The Underdevelopment of Development

February 1991 Revision

by Andre Gunder Frank

From a Personal Preface to the Author's Intentions

Economics and development economics and thinking have often been roughly divided into neo-classical
(right), Keynesian (center), and Marxist (left). More colloquially and more usefully, we may distinguish
Conservative, Reformist and Radical variants as in the recent Economic Development: The History of an
Idea by H.W.Arndt 1987). Most authors probably regard themselves as too heterodox to be classified in
any of these orthodox categories. Or they regard themselves as technician scientists, with no political
color. If obliged to chose however, they probably would feel themselves least uncomfortable, like
President Eisenhower, in the extreme middle of the road.

Moreover, the Methodenstreit has often been more severe within each of these categories than
between
them. Indeed, the first of these categories almost never, and the second only rarely, even take explicit
account of the third. For instance a decade ago, Ben Higgins (1977: 117-8) observed with chagrin that
when development economics was reviewed for the American Economic Association in 1971, one of its
reviewers, Robert Solow, said "we neglected radical economics because it is negligible." Even now, The
State of Development Economics: Progress and Perspectives, edited by Gustav Ranis and T. Paul
Schultz (1988), out of eighteen chapters, devotes only one to dependence, written by Raul Prebisch. He
makes little mention, and the other authors and chapters of the book none at all, of more radical or
Marxist writings. Therefore, it may not be amiss to give this "neglected" study disproportionate and more
personal attention here. However, the role of dependence writing in this development theory has recently
received some more disinterested attention in several surveys, not of development economics but of
development theory (Kay 1989, Hunt 1989, Hettne 1990, Larrain 1989). These and other surveys by
people who were not there often speculate about who among those who were may have influenced or
copied from whom. The autobiographical part of this essay and my references to other dependentistas
and others along "my way" sets the record straight for my part in this history.

I therefore intend to undertake a political sociology of knowledge of "The Birth, Life and Death of
Development Economics" (Seers 1979) or "The Rise and Decline of Development Economics"
(Hirschman 1981) based on my own experience and perspective. Thus, I will pass review on the three
varieties of development economics -- and autobiographically my own participation in all of them --
nearly as unequally as others. However, I will devote respective shares of emphasis and space to them in
reverse order: the least to the conservative if not reactionary orthodox neo-classical variety
preponderantly treated elsewhere; more to the right and left center Keynesian and other structural /
reformist theory and policy; and most to the supposedly radical left (and mostly left out) dependency and
"neo-Marxist" writings -- and their battles with the former especially in Latin America -- with which my
name is mostly associated. Thus, I will also be able to show how I have had a foot or toe in each of
these camps and several of their subdivisions.

Perhaps I can also clarify how on further "reflection and summing up," my multiple choice is now none of
the above. Nor would I wish to find myself in any of these camps when H.W. Arndt (1987: 162-3) can
write

Are we then to conclude that Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Gunnar Myrdal and Peter Bauer, all proponents of
material progress, must be regarded as "Right" and A. G. Frank, Dudley Seers, the Ayatollah Khomeini,
and the pope as "Left"? Or is it the other way around? Clearly there is something wrong, certainly in
relation to economic development as a policy objective, with these labels.

An occasion and incentive (or excuse) to write a first version of this autobiographical survey of
development theory arose when I received and accepted an invitation to contribute to a Festschrift in
honor of my longtime friend Benjamin Higgins. The invitation was to write on the general theme of "equity
and efficiency in economic development" but at the same time to write "a philosophical and
contemplative essay... [which] need not be 'scientific'...[but instead] an occasion for reflection and
summing up of a sort that 'learned journals' would not publish." Moreover, Higgins encouraged me to
make my contribution autobiogaphical. Therefore, I set out to attend to all of these invitations for the
following reasons and with the following intentions: 1) 30 years` friendship with Ben Higgins, 2) the receipt
of more and more invitations (especially by anthropologists!) to lecture on something like "the rise and
decline of dependence and Gunder Frank," 3) the already prior proposal to me by Albert Hirschman and
Paul Streeten to write down an autobiographical account similar to their own, and Higgins' enthusiastic
encouragement to do so here and now, 4) the encouragement by others to write a full blown
autobiography, of which the present might become a draft chapter or two, 5) my desire to participate in
the generalized agonizing reappraisal of experience with "development," 6) the urging by my wife Marta
Fuentes with her help to work on, if not to work out, another concept of development,
and last but not
least 7) the call for responses to the increasingly generalized (consciousness of) crisis in development
and development thinking.

All of these occasions, incentives, and purposes are reflected below. Therefore, this essay also includes
some special references to Higgins' own writing on "equity and efficiency in economic development" and
more contributions on the same than she is willing to acknowledge by Marta Fuentes, who asked to
withdraw her name from authorship. In consequence, I now offer this essay as my own "contributuion" to
the agonizing reappraisal of development in general.

From the Development Crisis Towards a Conceptual Introduction

The 1000 delegate 1988 congress of the International Society for Development in New Delhi was
dominated by the theme of crisis. There was a sensation of total bankruptcy in development policy,
thinking, theory and ideology, indeed of development tout court:

There emerged a strong and recurrent theme: We are at the end of an era and need to look
beyond development to the survival strategies of the people if we want to understand what is really
happening in the Third World (Development Forum, July-August 1988, p. 1).

Little wonder, as Latin Americans were lamenting their 1980s "lost decade of development." The per
capita income and/or product is still their main official measure of development. Yet it had fallen by 10 to
15 percent back to a level of more than a decade before. In Africa, per capita national income had fallen
over 25 percent to a level below that at the time of Independence, over two decades before. In both
continents as elsewhere, these average declines of course hide their also worsening distribution, as "the
poor pay more" of this decline than the rich. Thus, export led growth had failed in Latin America and
self-reliance and "African Socialism" in Africa.

The Socialist countries first seemed to do well, but then they were also caught in the vice of crisis.
Socialist national product and income had also fallen 25 percent in a four year period in Poland. Economic
and political crisis went from bad to worse in Stalinist Rumania (lights out), worker-management
Yugoslavia (threat of army intervention), not to mention liberated Vietnam (chaos and reprivatization).
Even in reformist showcase Hungary, the average real wages in 1989 returned to the 1970 level.
According to recent revelations, 25 percent of Hungarians live in poverty. In the Soviet Union, the
Brezhnev period has been re-baptized as one of "stagnation." In reality many economic sectors (heavy
industry) and social indices (infant mortality rates) have in fact deteriorated. As a result, the Revolution of
1989 occured in Eastern Europe since my writing of the above and most of the rest of this essay.

In the short run, not development, but crisis management has become the order of the day in much of the
South and East (with significant partial exceptions in India, China and the East Asian NICs). In the West
also, Reaganomic military Keynesianism was keeping the economy (temporarily?) afloat on borrowed
time and money. No one anywhere left, right, or center, any longer has any practical solutions to offer.
Neither advocates of neo-classical capitalist stabilization and adjustment in their neo-liberal guises, nor
neo-structuralist advocates of reformist structural change, or even of radical socialist perestroika and
glasnost can promise a credible solution to the crisis, much less for development. Even so, many of the
former still, and some of the latter newly, prefer to masquerade their own ideological, theoretical and
policy bankruptcy behind the newly fashonable neo-liberal phrases of promoting economic growth
(=development?) by letting "the magic of the market" "get the prices right."

For the longer run, the environmental costs of past and present development styles have become
increasingly ominous. The need for ecologically "Sustainable Development" (Redclift 1987) has become
more urgent and obvious than when the Club of Rome referred to "The Limits of Growth" a decade and a
half ago. Similarly, there is greater consciousness of how in the long run economic "development is bad
for women" and largely at their expense.

Moreover as I will observe below, capitalist and socialist development orthodoxies turn out to share more
in common on all these and other scores than the differences their right and left advocates have so long
fought about. Both have come up against their respective or common dead end(s). Therefore, both
orthodoxies (or their commonality) are / is also subject to refutation, rejection and replacement by an ever
changing kaleidoscope of alternative ideological views and practical implementation of another
development.

Furthermore, each of these alternatives is representative of and carried or promoted by one or more
social movements. Some are reactionary against, and others progressive beyond, the postwar
development orthodoxy/ies. Islamic and various indigenous revivalists and other ethnic groups combat
Western (including Marxist socialist) modernization and promote a variety of cultures instead.
Environmentalists try to reverse or at least to avoid further ecological degradation. Countless community
and small-is-beautiful groups seek to protect their members' livelihood and identity. To do so, they pursue
and organize another productive, distributional, political and cultural self-development through
self-mobilization. Feminists and other women, who often express de facto feminist prose on the stage of
social oppression, fight to change the gender structure of society. Thereby, they also improve the de facto
conception and de jure definition of development. Their conceptions of equity, efficiency and economy in
development are altogether different from those measured by growth rates of GNP.

From Equity to Efficiency in Economic Development

The invitation was to write for the Higgins Festschrift on the general theme of equity and efficiency in
economic development. Whatever the purpose or audience, that is a good theme indeed. However,
contrary to Higgins and his editor, it is not easy to do. For the general theme immediately raises the more
particularist question of equity and efficiency, not to mention economic development, for whom?

Equity...for whom? What is it (or its measure) in an unequal world? Should unequals receive equal
or
(what?) unequal treatment, as the old but still unresolved adage goes? The policy of affirmative action
acknowledges that is it only equitable to provide, even to assure, unequal treatment to unequals. Of
course, this new inequality is intended to counteract or balance the original inequality and inequity a bit.
But then even little affirmative action is in turn rejected (eg. recently by the U.S. Supreme Court) as too
much, because it is also inequitable. And equal competitive market treatment of unequals, not to mention
monopolistic treatment of those who have neither property not power, further increases both inequality
and inequity.

Efficiency...for whom? That is a measure of the relation of means to (whose?) ends. What if the
end is or
even includes equity? Then neither market "efficiency," nor planning "efficiency," or perhaps not
even
participatory democracy are efficient. The market is not, because it accepts and enlarges inequity and
inequality. Planning is not, because it gives the planners or their political bosses inequitable and unequal
power to serve their own interests at the expense of others. Moreover, planning produces more red tape
than economic welfare. Participatory democracy may also not be efficient, because it is often unworkable.
And when it works, it institutionalizes endless discussion or dispute. What is more, what if we reject
means-end-efficiency altogether as a male (imposed) and also otherwise unacceptable Aristotelian
schema? For it may operate at women's and others' expense and counter to their spiritual or
(other)intellectual dispositions.

Economic development...for whom? What if it turns out that development is bad for women (that's
already half the population)? And what if it is bad for quite a few others as well, inasmuch as much
development occurs at their expense and omits or even marginalizes them from its benefits? A forteriori
for economicdevelopment. Perhaps social development would be a more equitable and
better end. But
then what is the measure of equity, let alone of efficiency?

For whom? Emperors, kings, and/or their prime ministers for centuries, Bismark and Stalin, and
then
postwar ideologies right,left and center all referred to development for the "country." De facto, of course,
it
was never for everybody in the country. Moreover, everybody claimed explicitly or implicitly that someone
did or might have a development "policy" for the country. Frankly, I have long since and all
along doubted
the verity and even the plausibility of this last proposition, at least under capitalism. But now I also refer
the reader to my comments on "socialist planning" above and below. Moreover, as I will argue below after
retracing my tortuous road, it now also appears that if "development" has any operational sense at all, it
is
not in reference to a country or (often non) nation state. Instead, the only meaningful development is of
the world economy and society at one level and for much smaller social groups or individuals at another
level. For the latter, development policy is very different from that implied by development policy writers
and planners. Efficiency may be individual or group means to their respective ends, but equity between
individuals or groups is hardly considered. World development still seems to follow a macro historical
course, which is largely beyond intentional human micro controls. Therefore policy (making) is hardly
even relevant for world development at all.

In a word, dealing with equity and efficiency in economic development is really not so easy after all. Below
I will show that since I was driven by my passion for justice and equity, I saw more difficulties than others
in combining equity and efficiency under capitalism, already when it all began for me in the 1950s. But
since then, experience and reflection have obliged me to make (shades of John Foster Dulles) agonizing
reappraisals also of some "socialist" illusions about equity and efficiency in economic development. I
shared them with many in the 1960s, agonized over them in the 1970s, and I had to leave them by the
wayside of my long and not yet ending road in the 1980s. Alas moreover, I do not have the comfort of
replacing my old illusions by the new ones about the "magic of the market," which are now so popular
West, East, and South. I may now retrace some of the steps and major bends, as well as the changing
scenery, along the way of development thinking and praxis for others and for me to indicate where I stand
now. Who knows for how long.

The recipes for the establishment's main course development of development thinking are well known. So
is their proof in the unsavory eating of the pudding. Both have recently been oft reviewed, as noted above.
Even the rise and decline of the (supposed) alternative theories and policies of dependent
underdevelopment have been widely reviewed. Therefore, I can here confine myself to doing the same
once over lightly and devote more attention instead to how my own nuisance value flea bite participation
in this unfolding story has changed my own perceptions.

From Development of Development Thinking to its Underdevelopment

(with apologies to my some time colleague Ian Livingston)

The idea, if not the name, of economic development started long ago, like the idea of progress with which
they are largely synonymous. Where and when they started is hard to tell. However, it may be well to
recall some famous "developers": The Chinese emperor who had all wheels cut to the same size to
promote standardization and exchangeability of parts (like Colt and Ford millennia later), Peter the Great
who wanted to "develop" Russia, and Stalin who sought the same and by many of the same means.

Closer to home, development was also the first and foremost concern of all classical political economists
from Petty and Hume, via Smith and Ricardo, to the Mills and Marx. These same economists were also
concerned with equity distribution and efficiency allocation in development. Indeed, this concern with
equity and efficiency in development long dominated economics. Then the neo-classical marginalist
(counter)revolution of the 1870s subtracted both distributional equity and economic development to leave
only allocational efficiency in economics. This was just as the world economy was going into a long
Kondratieff B phase crisis and its British hegemonic center was beginning its decline in the face of
growing competition from its German and American rivals. One result was the growth of more monopoly
capitalism (while marginalists focussed on the efficiency of competition). Another result was renewed
colonialism and the drain of resources and capital from South to North (while marginalists deleted
development from the economists' menu). Before this "marginal" counterrevolution, my present above
cited subtle distinctions among varieties of (development) economics would have been hard to make.
Indeed, Marx had written that England showed India the "developed" mirror of its future and that the
Mexican-American war was progressive. Marx argued, as Texans and New Mexicans will be glad to
know, that annexation would promote the development of the annexed territories and perhaps even of
the remainder of Mexico as well. Since the advent of neo-classical marginalism, economists would have
none of that! Marginalist microeconomists preferred to sit it out on a side track,
while the world
economic development was passing by on the main track.

It took another Kondratieff B phase crisis in the world economy and the Keynesian revolution response to
put economists back on track. Even then, they only did so for particular Western countries. There they put
macroeconomic problems, some considerations of macro-equity and development by another name
(stagnation a la Hansen) back on the agenda. Any other development elsewhere was only of interest
insofar as it might pose a competitive threat to the West. Thus, Folke Hilgerdt studied Industrialization and
Foreign Trade in The Network of World Trade for the League of Nations (1945, 1942). The also non
marginalist Schumpeter remained marginal with his emphasis on technological growth in the Theory of
Economic Development. Even his immediately relevant Business Cycles, not to mention his macro
political economic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy remained marginal. De facto, the Keynesians (
though perhaps not Keynes himself) continued to accept the neo-classical tenets of (non)equity through
perfect competition at the micro level and to exclude world and third world development from the agenda.

Another Kondratieff B phase world economic crisis today has now led to another crisis and the total
bankruptcy of all neo -classical micro theory and (post)Keynesian macro theory as well as of their policies.
This new crisis has put on the economists agenda to remarry (reformed) macro and micro economics in a
new union of world political economic development. However, economists' by now congenital short
sightedness and self-imposed blinkers prevent most (development) economists from seeing either the
crisis or how to resolve it. Demand side macro economics must divest itself from the unrealistic
assumption of a supply curve, which is infinitely elastic until it becomes totally inelastic at a mythical full
employment level. (So interpreted, the supply siders on the Reaganite right and the Marxist left have a
valid point). Supply side microeconomics must divest itself from the unreal assumption of perfect
competition and foresight. (The monopolistic and imperfect competition economists like Robinson and
Chamberlain had a point in the previous crisis).

Macro- and micro-economics must then be married into a union, which takes account of the macro
economic effects of individual (firm) microeconomic decisions -- and vice versa, the macroeconomic
influences on these same microeconomic decisions. Both must devote special attention to supply side
decisions and policies of technological change and to the demand side conditions under which they are
made. Moreover perhaps following Pasinetti (1981), we must reinsert the classical political economists
considerations of distributional equity, sectoral imbalance and dynamic developmental into this new
demand-and-supply-side union. Finally, all these must be united in face of a single world economy, whose
political economic development is the final arbiter of all this economic theory and policy; although it is
itself hardly subject to either. But this is getting ahead of my story, and I may leave it to return to this
matter at the end. But first a brief glance at the supposed Marxist alternative.

Marxism and then Marxist socialism also have not always turned out quite as its proponents since Lenin
and Stalin hoped, or as its marginalist and then cold warrior antagonists feared. As it turned out, the
development of socialism everywhere has become, or rather remained, the really existing "socialism" of
development. Often it even lacked the sometimes dubious virtues of capitalist development. Yet "socialist
development" retained most of the vices of inequity / inequality, and therefore also of inefficiency,
environmental degradation and the alienation of man, not to mention woman, against which Marx
inveighed. (An old joke in the socialist countries: capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Socialism is
just the opposite. A new even more cruel joke there: Communism/socialism is the most painful road from
capitalism to capitalism). Let me now take up my story again at the end of World War II.

If anthropology was the child of imperialism and colonialism (Gough 1968, Asad 1975), then the new
development thinking was the child of neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism. It developed (not the least at
MIT) as a part and parcel instrument of the new postwar American hegemony. American ambitions
extended over the ex-colonial world in the South and against both the real old Western colonialism and
the perceived threat of new Eastern colonialism and imperialism. At the end of World War II, the "newly
emerging" "young nations" - like millenarian China and India! - came of post semi/colonial age.
Simultaneously and not independently, the First New Nation (Lipset's title), the United States, ascended to
neo-imperial hegemony. That is when development studies came into their own, and the new
development ideology swept the world. The Chinese Communist peasant victory among one quarter of
the world's population in 1949 put the fear of God in many minds. They feared its extension or indigenous
repetition in newly independent India, self-liberated Korea, and elsewhere. A decade later, the Cuban
Revolution would revive this same fear again. Developing a more harmless alternative became a matter
of the greatest urgency, especially in the newly hegemonic United States.

These circumstances and new American need help explain the significant changes in the development of
development thinking and terminology in the 1950s and since. They followed the enunciation of the
Truman Doctrine and his Point Four Technical Aid Program. The wartime and early postwar major
writings on development issues had been mostly by Europeans, like Rosenstein-Rodan, Nurkse, Myrdal,
and Singer and then by the Latin American Prebisch. These soon found themselves embattled and
overcome by the more conservative and more neo-classical theses from American pens. For the general
public at the same time, new euphomisms for the subject peoples and countries were launched to
replace previous ones as each became unpalatable or impolitic: "colonial" and "backward" was
replaced
by "undeveloped" and then by "underdeveloped." More recently that was replaced again by
"less
developed" (LDCs) or the better sounding but less accurate "developing" countries. Their models are
now
"new(ly) industrializing countries" (NICs).

Of course, the new American development of development theory also partook of American pragmatism
and empiricism. "Science is Measurement" was engraved on the cornerstone of the University of Chicago
building where I studied for my economics PhD. Development became increasingly equated with
economic development, and that became equated de facto if not de jure with economic growth. It in turn
was measured by the growth of GNP per capita. The remaining "social" aspects of growth = development
were called "modernization," and the political ones "freedom."

The new United Nations commissioned five wise men to write out the American way of development
(United Nations 1951). Americans with no previous Third World experience, like the neo-classical Jacob
Viner, pontificated about development. All argued that development meant following step by step in our
(American idealized) footsteps from tradition to modernity. The measure of it all was how fast the modern
sector replaced the traditional one in each dual economy and society. That is, as long as, God and
America forbid, there were no far-reaching structural reforms, let alone political revolutions. Of course,
American instigated and supported counter-revolution and even invasion in Guatemala in 1954, Lebanon
in 1958, etc. were Ok. That is where I demurred.

From Autobiographical Background to Chicago Economics

(With Apologies to the Reader, who may skip ahead)

To explain why and how I demurred and sought to do otherwise, it is time to insert some autobiography
into the unfolding of this development story. My autobiographical reflections, however, may be of some
interest and use to the reader also insofar as they will include when, where and how along the winding
road I bumped into and rubbed shoulders or exchanged snubs with various personalities in the
"development field" and how I debated with their thinking.

I may get the most personal parts of this autobiography out of the way first. However, they may help
explain my parts in the political sociology of knowledge that follows. My pacifist novelist father had taken
me out of Nazi Germany when I was four years old in 1933. In the 1950s, he wrote his autobiography
under the title Links wo das Herz Ist (translated as Heart on the Left). I went to Ann Arbor High School
and then to Swarthmore College. There, in part under my father's influence, I studied economics and
became a Keynesian. In 1950, not knowing what I was letting myself in for, I started a Ph D in economics
at the University of Chicago. I took Milton Friedman's economic theory course and passed my PhD
exams in economic theory and public finance with flying colors. Despite that, I received a letter from the
Chicago Economics Department advising me to leave, because of my unsuitability or our incompatibility.

I went on to the University of Michigan and studied for a semester with Kenneth Boulding and Richard
Musgrave. I wrote a paper on welfare economics for Boulding, which proved that it is impossible to
separate efficiency in resource allocation from equity in income distribution. [Later Ian Little would become
famous for doing the same thing. Now (Little 1982) also pontificates on Economic Development and
dismisses my writings on the same as unpersuasive]. I took the paper, for which Boulding had given me
an A+, back to Chicago to get at least an MA out of them. First they made me cut the heart of the
argument out of my paper, and then they gave me a C for it. Then I dropped out altogether. I became a
member of the beat generation at the Vesuvius cafe in San Francisco's North Beach before Jack Keruac
arrived there On the Road.

I was introduced to "development" and at the same time re-entered the University of Chicago through the
back door by accident. This was the availability of a research assistantship in Bert Hoselitz's Research
Center in Economic Development and Cultural Change at the University of Chicago. In Bert's absence on
leave, the planner and acting director Harvey Perloff hired me only to tell me to his dismay that I am "the
most philosophical person" he had ever met. He put me to work evaluating the early World Bank reports. I
gave their reports on Ceylon, Nicaragua, and Turkey barely passing marks in my earliest publications
(Frank 1955 a and b).

Also for reasons of financial circumstance, I then spent an interval at Chicago working on the Soviet
economy (in a research project whose final client was the U.S. Army Psychological Warfare Division!). As
a result, I subsequently wrote my Chicago economics PhD dissertation on a comparison of productivity
growth between agriculture and industry in the Soviet Ukraine. In this thesis, I independently worked out
the concepts and measures of general productivity, which later came to be known as total productivity. I
also stressed its role in measuring the contribution of "Human Capital and Economic Growth" in a journal
edited and published at the University of Chicago (Frank 1960). In another journal there, I also published
"General Productivity in Soviet Agriculture and Industry," which stressed the role of economic organization
(Frank 1958). According to H.W. Arndt (1987:62), the idea of human capital was "almost single-handedly
introduced into economics" by the then chairman of the Chicago economics department, T.W. Schultz,
who subsequently was awarded the Nobel Prize.

It was this work of mine to which John Toye (1987:104) refers when he writes "the archetypical Western
radicalized intellectual, who at that time [1970s] dominated development thinking was Andre Gunder
Frank, the orthodox Chicago economist who abruptly became a Latin American revolutionary figure
(compare Frank 1958 and 1972)." My ex-colleague and (ex?)friend at Michigan State, Paul Strassman
(19xx) would later call me a "renegade" from Chicago economics.

Yet already at the University of Chicago, I spent more and more of my time studying and associating with
the anthropologists. This helped me come to the same conclusion as my friend Bert Hoselitz (but I
thought, independently of him) that the determinant factors in economic development were really social
.

Social change, therefore, seemed the key to both social and economic development. I wrote about social
conflict and favorably reviewed Albert Hirschman's Strategy of Economic Development in Bert Hoselitz's
journal Economic Development and Cultural Change (Frank 1960). I conferred with him and Bob
Lindblom about our convergent conflict studies. Hirschman would later recall this agreement also about
unbalanced growth in his own autobiographical reflections, published in Pioneers in Development
(Meier
and Seers, eds. 1984). More recently, he suggested to me that I should do a similar autobiographical
account myself.

From MIT's CENIS Politics to Mine

In 1958, I spent three months as visiting researcher at MIT's Center for International Studies (CENIS) and
met Ben Higgins, W.W. Rostow and the others. There Rostow wrote his Process of Development and
later his Stages of Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, not to mention his work for the CIA there with
Max Millikan. (See for instance Millikan and Rostow 1957 A Proposal. Key to an Effective Foreign Policy).
Although Rostow and Co. dealt with Keynesian type macro economic and even social problems, they did
so to pursue the neo-classical explicitly counter revolutionary and even counter reformist cold war ends,
which were newly in vogue. The quintessimal modernization book, Lerner's Passing of Traditional Society:
The Modernization of the Middle East, appeared at MIT' CENIS in 1958, while I was there. At the same
time, Everett Hagen wrote his On the Theory of Social Change and David McClelland his Achieving
Society there, and Ithiel de Sola Pool his right libertarian / authoritarian political works.

While I was unknowingly in this lion's den, Walt Whitman Rostow "confided" to me that since the age of
18
he made it his life mission to offer the world a better alternative to Karl Marx. I did not then understand
what that was supposed to mean. After reflecting on the fate of really existing Marxism and socialism I
may now be permitted to wonder why Rostow wanted to dedicate his life to offering an alternative to them.
Moreover, in case that were not enough, he then proposed to bomb Vietnam back into the stone age. I
have often wondered since then what the Rostow parents would feel about the ideological and political
development of the children they named after Walt Whitman and Eugene Debs. The first ideologist went
on to plan his nuclear development policies in the Kennedy-Johnson White House basement, and the
second super hawk represented the Reagan White House in the pre-Gorbachev era arms "control" talks.
However, I may also ask how I came to propose an alternative "paradigm change from Rostow to Gunder
Frank," as Aidan Foster-Carter (1976) called it.

I may pursue the answer. In 1959, I gave a paper on social change and reform through social conflict at
the American Anthropological Association meetings in Mexico. I also co-chaired the anthropological
theory sessions with Margaret Mead. At a subsequent anthropology confererence, Maggie especially
congratulated me on my delivery of a paper later published as "Administrative Role Definition and Social
Change" (Frank 1963). The paper was subsequently reprinted in the business management text Studies
in Managerial Process and Organizational Behavior, Turner et al 1972). Both papers were based on my
earlier analysis in "Goal Ambiguity and Conflicting Standards: An Approach to the Study of Organization"
(Frank 1958-59). I presented the same approach at a State Department training seminar for visiting Third
world technicians.

From this idea about social change it was but a short step for me, if not for others, to jump to the political
conclusion that the really important real factors in development are political. Since political change
seemed difficult if not impossible to achieve through reform, the obvious answer therefore seemed to be
the need to start change through political revolution. It became increasingly clear to me that all American,
including my own, development studies and thinking therefore were not at all part of the solution to
development problems. Instead they were themselves really part of the problem, since they sought to
deny and obscure both the real problem and the real solution, which lay in politics.

To find out more about that, I went to Cuba in 1960, soon after the revolution. After that I briefly looked at
political change in Kwame Nukrumah's Ghana (where I was disappointed to find little) and in Seku Toure's
Guinea (where I mistakenly thought that I had found more and better). Then, I decided to be
consequential: I quit my assistant professorship at Michigan State University. (I had lead an
interdisciplinary development seminar there, and I had already complained about MSU training police
forces in South Vietnam - many years before this CIA project would become a public scandal). So I went
to find (out for) myself from the "inside" in the "underdeveloped" "Third" World itself.
Since I decided I
would never become an African, I went to Latin America, where acculturation seemed less daunting.
Thacher Robinson gave me the money -and his confidence- to do so.

From Reform to Revolution in Latin America

In 1962, I left the United States and went to Mexico, and I wrote about the "Janus faces" of Mexican
inequality. I saw internal colonialism there instead of separate sectors in a "dual" economy or society. In
Venezuela, my friend Hector Silva Michelena told me I had written a Hamlet without the Prince of
Denmark of American imperialism. Then, via Peru and Bolivia, I arrived in Chile. In Venezuela, the
sociologist Julio Cotler (later at the Institute of Peruvian Studies in Lima), sent me to see his brother in law
Jose Matos Mar in Peru. He in turn introduced me to Anibal Quijano, later my friend and neighbor in
Santiago, while he wrote on marginalization and other matters at the CEPAL/ECLA Division of Social
Affairs. But first Anibal gave me a letter to his friends Pepe and Erika Rodriguez in Santiago with
instructions to introduce me to a lady there. They did, to Marta Fuentes.

We met and shared our concern for social justice, which would guide our concern for development with
equity before efficiency. We married and had two children with whom, as with each other, we still speak
Spanish. Together, but without consulting our children and at their cost, we embarked on the long - and
as it turned out tortuous - road "to change the world." At least we sought to change some of its thinking
in the name of equitable justice.

To begin with, I wrote a critique of an article on land reform by Jacques Chonchol. (Later he would direct
agricultural development for the Christian Democratic Chilean President Frei and then become Minister of
Agriculture for the Socialist Party President Allende). Chonchol had counselled, and later practiced, slow
land reform. I argued for the necessity of fast agrarian and other revolution, to forestall
counter-reform.
This was probably my first explicit critique of reformism from a more radical perspective. Marta had
serious reservations about my thesis then and completely rejects it now. I also foretold that any economic
integration of Latin America would help foreign investors more than local ones. All three articles were
published in Monthly Review in English and the first and second respectively also in Politica in Mexico
and Panorama Economico in Chile. I started to direct myself first and foremost to a Latin American
audience.

Upon marriage, we set off into the unknown. I wangled an invitation to a major conference on reformist
structuralist vs. monetarist conservatism in Rio de Janeiro in January 1963. Albert Hirschman was there,
but I arrived late because of visa problems and a bus stuck in the mud between the Brazilian-Uruguayan
border and Puerto Alegre. By then, I wanted a curse on both their conservative and reformist houses. I
increasingly saw the reformist house as no more than a remodeled capitalist one. I thought it was
necessary to replace this one by a different socialist house instead. Just how much tearing down and
rebuilding this change of houses might involve was less than clear.

This was the time of the Cuban revolution and President Kennedy's response through the reformist
Alliance for Progress. At its Punta del Este meeting, Che Guevara called it an alliance for "the
latrinization" of Latin America. These political issues of development put ECLA/CEPAL type structuralism
on the political economic agenda. They called for some land, tax, administrative, educational, health
(including latrines) and other reforms and/or social development. However, this agenda was more
theoretical than practical. It was not designed to overcome the political obstacles to reform, but to
maintain them. Development policy, not to mention praxis, remained too inequitable and too
inefficient.
Nor did its North and Latin American political sponsors have much confidence in their own announced
policies: They offered reforms with one hand, and with the other they trained the Latin American armed
forces against guerrillas and the police forces to repress popular demonstrations and to torture civilians.

I still welcomed any proposed reforms, but considered them insufficient if not altogether unworkable. I
regarded this social development to be inadequately attractive, condemned the military and police
repression of popular demands, and put my confidence instead in the Cuban way. Of course, Cuba was
developing socially and visibly improving education, health, reduced race and gender discrimination,
etc. It was not yet clear that this was the main forte of the Cuban way. No one yet knew that this social
development was not being matched by or grounded on a concomitant development of its economic base.
The inadequate or incorrect Cuban development of this economic bases would ultimately make the
continued social development dependent on the aid of massive foreign subsidy.

In a sense, the Cuban experience has been a test of the Ted Schultz et al (and earlier my) thesis that the
prior development of human capital through education, health, and improved social relations would then
lead to social and economic development. The often remarked success of social development in Cuba
and to a lesser extent in other socialist countries has not proven to be enough for viable economic
development. On the contrary, Cuba and other socialist countries now have to rein in their social welfare
states, because their insufficiently developed economies cannot afford them. Ironically, that is what
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher argue at home as well. Indeed, all now argue that less social
development is necessary for more economic development!

But to return to my story, after the 1962-63 Sino-Soviet split and their lengthy document debates, I also
accepted the Chinese line, because it appeared more revolutionary. The line and praxis of the Soviet and
Soviet aligned Latin American Communist parties were too reformist. Indeed, in praxis they were hardly
distinguishable from "national bourgeois" and ECLA/CEPAL reformism. The only big difference was that
the former did, and the latter did not, refer to American imperialism as an obstacle to development in Latin
America and elsewhere in the Third World.

I wrote an article on "Aid or Exploitation?" It countered the conservative claim of Lincoln Gordon,
the
American ambassador to Brazil (who was later implicated in and supportive of the 1964 military coup) that
foreign aid helped Brazil much. The article also rebutted the more reformist reply that aid only helped a
little, as Roberto Campos, the Brazilian ambassador to the United States (whom I met at lunch in Rio and
who subsequently became minister of planning for the military government) had replied to Gordon. My
article contained the then radical proposition and figures to show that Brazil and Latin America in fact
were net capital exporters to the United States, which far from aiding them, thereby exploited them. At the
same time, Hamza Alavi published a similar article about aid to Pakistan; and I began exchanging our
writings and corresponding about them. The leading Rio daily Jornal do Brasil gave my article a whole
page, and it was republished about a dozen times. The article created a political storm and led to my
invitation to the Brazilian congress by Leonel Brizola and to their homes by other progressive
parlamentrians.

We had moved to Brasilia for jobs (I in anthropology and Marta in the library) in the new university there.
They were offered to me by its anthropologist founder-president Darci Ribeiro before he became Goulart's
Interior Minister (Jefe da Casa Civil). (Later, after the military coup, I visited both Brizola and Darci in their
Uruguayan exile. My relations with Darci became closer in Venezuela and Chile, where he advised
Allende. Later Darci became lieutenant governor and Brizola governor of Rio de Janeiro upon Brazil's
return to democracy. However, I always found their pragmatic political reformism insufficiently
revolutionary).

In Brasil, I also wrote an article on the foreign investment "Mechanisms of Imperialism" to counter the
gospel according to which the Third World needed foreign investment and capital. Received theory was
that the principal obstacle to development was the shortage of capital. I countered this universally
accepted supply side theory with the essentially Keynesian demand side argument that the real
economic obstacle was insufficient market demand for productive national investment. The same kind of
Keynesian and structrualist argument also underlay the policies of Brazilian and other nationalists, like
Celso Furtado. However, I critizided Furtado, the founder of SUDENE, who was then Minister of Planning
before the military replaced him by Campos. I argued that his and others policies of structural reform were
insufficient to expand the internal market and generate development.

At the University of Brasilia, Ruy Mauro Marini, Theotonio dos Santos, and his wife Vania Bambirra were
my students; and Marta was Vania's. None of us had yet thought of what would become our dependence
theory. Of course, neither could we then know how Latin American and our political developments would
later entangle our personal, intellectual and political paths through their exile in Mexico and Chile and
after the coup in the latter, for Marini and me even in Germany. All three of them are now back at the
University of Brasilia.

From Dualism to Dependence

(with apologies to Ben Higgins et al)

I wrote my first three theoretical works in Brasilia and later in Rio, where our first son was born in 1963.
They were directed at once against development theory and policy derived from (or camouflaged by)
neo-classical and monetarist development theory; against Keynesian and structuralist explanations; and
against CEPAL/ECLA, Alliance for Progress, and orthodox Marxist and Communist party theory, policy
and praxis. I put them all in the same sack. The reason was that, whatever their differences, they all
shared the view that underdevelopment was original or traditional. They all posited that development
would result from gradual reforms in dual economies/societies, in which the modern sector would expand
and eliminate the traditional one. Like Foster-Carter (1976), Diana Hunt (1989:172) regards my critique as
"an archtypal example of a paradigm switch." She wonders whether I had read or even heard of Kuhn's
book, which was published the year before. I must have been writing Kuhnian prose without knowing it,
since I certainly had not heard of it.

However, I quarrelled with these orthodoxies more about their vision of underdevelopment than with their
idea of development itself. I did not then find it remarkable that all also shared an essentially
similar
vision of capital accumulation through industrial growth = development. Because, so did I! One of the
subsequent critiques of my dependence paradigm change from Rostow to Gunder Frank was that I only
turned orthodoxy on its head. Doing so evaded and rendered impossible any fundamental other sideways
critique and reformulation, which I now regard necessary.

The first of the three works argued against dualism. It went into battle especially against the then
left-right-and-center dominant version according to which Brazilian and Latin American (traditional)
agriculture is feudal and that therefore capitalist reform was on the order of the day. Half the Portuguese
version was published by Caio Prado Jr. in his Revista Brasiliense before the 1964 military coup closed it
down. The English version was then included in Frank 1967. I also wrote a critique and auto-critique of a
book to which I was a contributor. The critique, entitled "Destroy Capitalism - Not Feudalism," was first
published in 1963 and reprinted in Frank 1969.

The second theoretical work in 1963 was a much farther ranging critique of received theories. It was
revised in 1965-66. After a dozen rejections, it was finally published in 1967 in the student magazine
Catalyst under the title "The Sociology of Development and the Underdevelopment." The critique targeted
the theories of all my former friends at Chicago, like Bert Hoselitz and Manning Nash, as well as
acquaintances or not at MIT, like Rostow and McClelland. In particular, I rejected the notion of "original"
underdevelopment, "traditional" society, and subsequent "stages of growth." I also rejected the
analisys of
development through neo-Parsonian social pattern variables and neo-Weberian cultural and
psychological categories. I found this new sociology of development to be "empirically invalid when
confronted with reality, theoretically inadequate in terms of its own classical social scientific standards,
and policy-wise ineffective for pursuing its supposed intention of promoting the development of
underdeveloped countries" (reprinted in Frank 1969:21). In the late 1960s and I suppose independently,
Suzanne Jonas-Bodenheimer (19xx) wrote a similar critique. Since I was rejecting all dualism (also in
another essay under the title "Dialectical, Not Dual Society," also in Frank 1969), I threw Ben Higgins'
technological dualism in for good measure, although I confess that I never understood it well then and still
don't now. Higgins argues (almost persuasively) that his version of dualism should never have been
included in what I was trying to reject.

The third work in 1963 was an extension from the second in the same manuscript. I sought to develop an
alternative reading, interpretation, and theory of the development of underdevelopment
. I saw it as
the result of dependence and as the opposite side of the coin (turning things on their head) of
development within a single world capitalist system. All of these ideas and terms were in the
original
1963 manuscript, which was not published until 1975 by Oxford University Press in India under the title
On Capitalist Underdevelopment (Frank 1975). The 1963 manuscript began:

Underdevelopment is not just the lack of development. Before there was development there was
no underdevelopment...[They] are also related, both though the common historical process that they have
shared during the past several centuries and through their mutual, that is reciprocal, influence that they
have had, still have, and will continue to have, on each other throughout history (Frank 1975:1).

The second chapter went on to examine "The History and Sociology of Underdevelopment" in Asia,
Africa, and Latin America (and even in the South of North America) after arguing:

Though it may be predicting if not prejudging our results a little, we may conveniently begin our
inquiry with a historical experience which all, or certainly almost all, of today's underdeveloped areas have
in common: their incorporation into and subsequent participation in the worldwide expansion of the
mercantilist and/or capitalist system (Frank 1975:21)

The third and main chapter "On Capitalist Underdevelopment" began:

The central thesis of this essay may now be discussed in greater detail. My thesis is that
underdevelopment as we know it today, and economic development as well, are the simultaneous and
related products of the development on a world-wide scale and over a history of over more than four
centuries at least of a single integrated economic system: capitalism....The interpretation of
underdevelopment and development as the related mechanisms and products of the development of the
single capitalist system over the centuries raises a host of theoretical, empirical, and terminological
problems.

Some of these are examined in the theoretical section of this essay below under the following
titles: (a) Capitalism and Feudalism - one does not universally follow the other; (b) Capitalism and
Mercantilism - their unity is more important than their differences; (c) Capitalism and
Colonialism/Imperialism - capitalism inevitably takes some colonial/imperial form, but the form changes
with the circumstances; (d) Capitalism and Internal colonialism - essentials of the colonial relation
inevitably occur within states as well as between them; (e) Capitalism and
Exploitation/Diffusion...(f)Capitalism and Class vs. Stratification...(g) Capitalism and Development /
Underdevelopment [setting out my main thesis]...(h) Capitalism and Socialism - socialism is the escape
from the exploitation and underdevelopment...(i) Capitalism and Liberation- escape from
underdevelopment and subsequent development is no longer possible for them as part of the capitalist
system, and only liberation through socialist revolution offers that possibility (Frank 1975:43-44).

Today, I would have to significantly revise only the last two of these theses, and then only the half of them
referring to what socialism can do.

Much of the historical material and many of the ideas in this manuscript were derived and then
reformulated from other Latin American writers. These were particularly the Argentinean Sergio Bagu and
the Brazilian Caio Prado Jr. Both recognized and appreciated my formulations. I similarly used and cited
the writings of Celso Furtado and the Chilean Anibal Pinto (both of whom I met in Brazil). However, both
always rejected my writings and me personally (especially the latter who spent years deriding and
combatting what he called my "catastrophism").

In short, it was quite a task at the time first to pose these questions, then to rethink the answers, and
finally to persuade others to rethink both. Yet a decade and a half later in England, my by then more or
less fifteen year old sons were able to cut through to the heart of the matter in one fell swoop.

Both had the good judgement never to read any of my stuff or anything similar. Yet one day out of the
blue, Paulo made his own discourse on imperialism and underdevelopment. It sounded to me like Marx,
Hobson, Luxemburg, Lenin, Baran, and even Frank, rolled into one, although he had never read any of
them. Paulo concluded with "if Latin America was a colony, it could not have been feudal" !
It took me
years to figure this out, and I never arrived at so clear and convincing statement of it. About the same time
in 1979 soon after we had arrived in England from Germany, my younger son Miguel observed "England
is an underdeveloping country." I ran to my class to tell my British students, and their
responses
sounded stupefied or incredulous. After several years of British deindustrialization under the
government
of Mrs. Thatcher, which took office in 1979, I repeated Miguel's earlier observation to a later generation of
students, who then reacted "of course."

Returning to my story in 1963, I also wrote a long (still available) letter to Rodolfo Stavenhagen, who
would later become famous for his "Seven Erroneous Theses." In my letter to him, I criticized his work
prior to these and set out the alternative dependency analyses I wanted to develop. Then, Stavenhagen
made a place for me (without pay) at the UNESCO sponsored Research Center in Social Sciences in Rio,
of which he was then a director. There I wrote the above cited 1963 manuscript, and Stavenhagen read it.
When I finally published it, I thanked him for so doing. However, I certainly did not copy anything then or
since from Stavenhagen's "Seven Theses" published in 1966, as Blomstrom and Hettne (1984) later
mistakenly intepreted my acknowledgment to him.

At this Institute in Rio also, my name became Andre Gunder Frank. A librarian there asked me if the
bibliographic references she had to publications by Andrew and to Andres were to the same author or not.
I decided to avoid such problems in the future by dropping the last letter -- or letters, since in German and
still in my passport the name is Andreas. The Gunder I had already acquired as a (slow) track runner in
high school. My teammates so nicknamed me by cruel comparison with Gundar Haag, the Swede who
then held five world records in middle and long distances. Unfortunately however, I did not know how the
name is correctly spelled.

In 1963 also, at the Brazilian Anthropological Society meetings in Sao Paulo, I criticized my fellow round
table participants Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Octavio Ianni, Mauricio Vinhas and others for their views
on dual society and development. I argued for an analysis of the relations among these socio-economic
sectors and of their dependence on the outside. On July 1, 1964, by then already back in Chile, I wrote an
also still available 12 page single space mimeographed letter to a dozen friends in the United States
recounting my political change of heart and my theoretical change of mind up to that time. I also set out a
program of research and writing for the future, some but not all of which came to pass. (This private letter
along with the published article on mechanism of imperialism was subsequently cited in a letter to me by
the U.S. government as the ideological reasons and supposedly legal grounds for which I was then, and
for 15 years more after that, inadmissible to the United States).

In 1964 in Chile also, I got a one month contract as a consultant to the Social Affairs Division of
CEPAL/ECLA to write something for an upcoming conference on "participacion popular." I wrote a long
manuscript, part in English and part in Spanish. But the United Nations insisted on deleting its name from
all of this "excessively radical" essay before distributing some copies to the conference participants. My
contract, of course, was not renewed. Yet the essay quoted all sorts of UN declarations and documents to
support my argument that governments should introduce a few reforms to permit and encourage people,
including supposedly marginal but really participatory ones, to work for their communities'
self-development through politically self-empowering participacion popular.

Since the UN then would have none this, I subsequently published much of this essay in separate parts.
One was on "The Indian Problem," which said that it was created by the economy and society as a whole
(in Frank 1967). Another was on "Rural Economic Structure and Peasant Political Power" (in Frank 1969).
The third was on "Urban Poverty in Latin America," also reprinted in Frank (1969) as "Instability and
Integration in Urban Latin America." In this part, my "excessively radical" thesis was that

it is possible to exaggerate the economic and socio-cultural importance of the urban-rural
distinction. It may be useful, instead, to consider the distinction between what might be called the
"stable"
or well-structured and the "unstable" sectors of the economy; and the corresponding distinction between
the "permanent" and the "floating" populations that are economically active or inactive in them....
[Both]
exist in both the urban and rural environments...[and] probably share a fairly similar economic structure
and cause. Possibly more alike still are the rural and urban incumbents in these relatively "unstructured"
and "unstable" roles. Certainly, they come from substantially the same socio-cultural group, especially if
the society is a multi-racial or multi-ethnic one; and often they are the same individuals displaced from
one environment to the other (and sometimes back again). Moreover, they occupy a large variety of these
roles simultaneously or in quick succession, shifting rapidly and easily among the "unstructured" roles, but
not between these and the more "structured" ones (Frank 1969:277-78).

What bitter irony that this same unstructured and unstable "informal" sector was discovered in Kenya a
decade later by the UN International Labour Organisation, five years after it too had fired me as
excessively radical. After that, the informal sector became formally established at the ILO and even at the
World Bank, as I will observe below. My office mate during my brief stay at CEPAL/ECLA had been
Adolfo Gurrieri, who now is the Director of its same Division of Social Affairs for which we worked.

The upshot of all these theoretical and political reflections - and maybe of the unpleasant experiences in
and with reformist institutions - was that continued participation in the same world capitalist system could
only mean continued development of underdevelopment. That is, there would be neither equity, nor
efficiency, nor economic development. The political conclusions, therefore, were to de-link from the
system externally and to transit to self-reliant socialism internally (or some undefined international
socialist cooperation) in order to make in- or non-dependent economic development possible. I hardly
considered and left for crossing-that-bridge-when-we-come-to-it how such post revolutionary economic
and social development would then be promoted and organized, not to mention guaranteed. I also gave
short shrift to how the necessarily not so democratic (pre) revolutionary means might or not promote or
even preclude the desireable post revolutionary end.

These early general ideas on dependent underdevelopment in the world as a whole then were my guides
to more specific analyses. "The Development of Underdevelopment in Chile" was written there in 1964 at
the invitation of Hugo Zemmelman for a special pre-election issue of the Socialist Party magazine
Aurauco, of which he was editor. The issue was then devoted to a collection of Salvador Allende's
speeches instead, and my essay remained unpublished for several more years. It had also been solicited
by Jim O'Conner for Studies on the Left, but its publication there was then vetoed by his co-editors,
especially Eugene Genovese. He regarded the essay as far too radical then. Later as colleagues in
Canada, he also regarded me personally as far too radical, vide his comments on me in his book In Red
and Black, not to mention an even more uncomradely article in our university newspaper (see Genovese
1968).

The following "the personal is political" anecdotes from 1964 in Santiago, Chile perhaps reveal a
different
side. I wrote a letter to the editor of the progressive daily La Ultima Hora defending Cassius Clay for
changing his name to Mohammed Ali for black nationalist and religious reasons. I submitted an article to
the same paper predicting an imminent military coup in Brazil, but they published instead one by their own
editor-owner Clodomiro Almeyda (later to become Allende's foreign minister) saying that all was well in
Brazil. The coup came three weeks later. When it did, I recommended to the Socialist-Communist FRAP
alliance that it should engage the Brazilian Paulo Freyre, whom I had met in Brazil when he was only
known in its Northeast, to work in the 1964 FRAP presidential campaign in Chile. FRAP paid no attention,
but the Christian Democratic election winner, Eduardo Frei, subsequently engaged the then also
Christian Democratic Freyre to work for him. Since then, Freyre has probably done more to promote self
development than perhaps anyone else in the world.

In the meantime, I went to the Santiago airport to pick up Fernando Henrique Cardoso when he arrived as
a Brazilian exile. On several occasion since, he told me that he appreciatively still regards this as more
important and unifying than our supposed differences.

In 1964 we went to Mexico and in 1965 I wrote "The Development of Underdevelopment in Brazil" there.
Then, in 1966 I wrote the more general "The Development of Underdevelopment," whose original title
continued "...and the Underdevelopment of Development." The essays on Chile and Brazil, along with
some others, became my first book Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (Frank 1967).
However, I had to pass literally untold trials and tribulations before I was finally able to get it published in
English in 1967, French in 1968, and Spanish only in 1970. The preface argued that "it will be necessary
instead scientifically to study the real process of world capitalist development and underdevelopment" and
that "social science must be political science" (Frank 1967: xii,xiv). The
emphasis was in the original,
which was dated (commemorating the Cuban Revolution) on July 26, 1965. However, someone at the
U.S. publisher changed the date of the preface from 1965 to 1966 to make it less distant from the long
delayed date of publication at the end of 1967.

From Generalization to Critique and Application

In Mexico also, I initiated three new departures. I was the first professor at the National School of
Economics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico to dream up and teach a course on
economic (under)development of Latin America. I was the first person to publish an accounting of Latin
America's external payments and receipts, which distinguished between services and goods. However,
first I had a hard time to persuade the editors of Comercio Exterior, who had first rejected my
"unorthodox" accounting procedures, to accept this innovation. With this new accounting, I clearly
demonstrated that the Latin American current account deficit was due to a large deficit on service
account, especially from financial service payments. These exceeded Latin America's surplus on
commercial account of excess exports over imports of goods (reprinted In Frank 1969). However, my
"unorthodox" novelty itself subsequently became a new orthodoxy. It proved to be particularly useful in the
now standard calculations of the ratio of debt service to export earnings. My third initiative was to organize
prominent progressive Latin American economists to sign a statement on "The Need for New Teaching
and Research of Economics in Latin America," based on its dependence (reprinted as Frank 1969
Chapter 4). I had drafted this statement with my colleague Arturo Bonilla and the Columbian Jose
Consuegra, who later published it and dozens of my articles in his journal Desarrollo Indoamericano. As I
recall, Celso Furtado refused to sign.

In Mexico, I also engaged in a number of debates about theoretical and political issues of development. At
the School of Political and Social Science, whose director then was Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, I roundly
criticized his recently published book La Democracia en Mexico for being scientifically and politically
unacceptable (reprinted in Frank 1969). We only made up again years later. I also debated about
capitalism or feudalism (my title was "With what Mode of Production does the Hen Lay its Golden Eggs")
in the Sunday supplement of a national newspaper with my Argentinean colleague, Rodolfo Puiggros. My
main message was that "if we are to understand the Latin American problematique we must begin with
the world system that creates it and go outside the self-imposed optical and mental illusion of the
Ibero-American or national frame" (Frank 1965 translated in Frank 1969:231). At the same time in Chile,
Luis Vitale was also arguing against the thesis of Latin American feudalism.

Then along the same lines, I began work on a "History of Mexican Agriculture from Conquest to
Revolution." However, I eventually ( in 1966 in Canada) wrote up only the first century of the same. My
then still very controversial thesis was that since the Conquest Mexican agricultural (under) development
was commercially driven and affected by transatlantic economic cycles. I used the data of important
previous analyses by the French writer Francois Chevalier (1970, original in 1952) and the American
historical geographer Woodrow Borah (1951) to turn their own theses up side down. I sent the
manuscript to Borah; and he wrote me that, because I did not use primary sources, my history was not
worth publishing. So I did not -- until over a decade later (Frank 1979). Then Borah wrote a review of the
book, saying that it should not have been published -- because it was old hat. Indeed, as Leal and
Huacuja (1982) demonstrate, in the meantime further historical research and analysis had converted my
far out unorthodoxy of the 1960s into the orthodoxy of the 1980s. Before leaving Mexico, I also did some
practical community development work in the field.

In Mexico also, on my way to Cuba which would never accept us, our second son was born. Gerrit Huizer
was the first to appear at the hospital. Since then, he worked with and wrote about peasants all over Latin
America and other parts of the world (Huizer 1972). Still now, he is helping with comments on this essay
and my other ones on social movements. Alonso Aguilar and Fernando Carmona befriended me
professionally, politically and personally. I vistited Ben Higgins in Cuernavaca. American friends visited
me, like the sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz and the anthropologists Rick Adams, Bob Adams, Norma
Diamond, and June Nash; years later, she would also stop by again in Chile. I also saw Harry and Beatie
Magdoff in Mexico before they joined my editor, friend and helper Paul Sweezy at Monthly Review.
Magdoff then arranged for a financial grant from the Rabinowitz Foundation to keep our bodies and souls
together and to permit my writing these things in Mexico, where the University paid me too little and too
late. I met Jim Cockcroft when he sold me a washing machine that did not work to wash our second son's
diapers. However, it did "work" to bring him and me and our mutual friend, Dale Johnson, whom I had met
in Chile, together enough to write a tripple barrled joint book, Dependence and Underdevelopment:Latin
America's Political Economy. However, long distance coordination among the authors and problems with
publishers delayed publication until 1970 in Spanish and 1972 in English.

In 1966 we went to Montreal, Canada for lack of another job in Mexico. Bert Hoselitz came to visit in
Montreal after reading and declining to publish the still unpublished "The Sociology of Development and
the Underdevelopment of Sociology," which criticized Bert, Ben and others so much. (Someone once said
that I had really wanted to kill my father figure Bert. But then it was also said that Fidel Castro made a
revolution against the Yankees, because they would not accept him as a major league baseball pitcher).

In 1967, we returned for a vacation to Santiago, Chile. There I found my exiled Brazilian friends Theotonio
dos Santos, Vania Bambirra and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and his Chilean co-author Enzo Faletto.
The latter had been Marta's friend since the 1950s, and in 1964 he commented on my Chile manuscript
as duly acknowledged in my preface. The Peruvian Anibal Quijano (who had brought us together in 1962)
also arrived in Santiago. All were now critically reading and discussing Regis Debray's recently published
guerrilla focus pamphlet Revolution in the Revolution. His and my French publisher Francois Maspero
claimed that my book provided the "scientific" basis for Debray's.

My Brazilian exile and Chilean friends in Chile were then also writing their own dependence books.
Cardoso and Faletto (1979) wrote their Dependence and Development in Latin America. Later some
"historians" and comentators outside Latin America would jum to the unwarranted conclusion that my
writings were inspired by them, and others that their book was written in answer to mine. Neither was true,
although Enzo Faletto had read my chapter on Chile in 1964, as noted above. Dos Santos wrote various
articles on dependence. However, Theotonio always maintained rather reformist leanings. Nonetheless,
others called his writings and mine, and later also those of my other Brasilia friend Ruy Mauro Marini,
"new" dependence writings. Supposedly, they led to more "revolutionary" conclusions than Cardoso
and
Faletto's version of dependence. They and Quijano were working in departments of ECLA/CEPAL (and
ILPES), whose inwardlooking Latin American industrialization program was running out of steam.
Therefore, Prebisch himself now recommended more radical reforms, and his younger co-workers all the
more so.

A couple of years later and also in response to some early critiques of my own writings by Theotonio and
others, I still argued that these reforms did not go far enough. That was in my Lumpenbourgeoisie:
Lumpendevelopment, which I advertised as a swan song of dependence theory. It was written in Spanish
and published in that language in eight different country editions beginning 1970 before being translated
into a half dozen other languages, including Japanese and into English as Frank (1972). In this regard, I
remember my argument with Oswaldo Sunkel, another CEPAL stalwart with first structuralist and then
dependence positions. Oswaldo insisted that his and my positions were the same, and I insisted that they
were not. The irony is that after repeated other meetings between us, two decades later Oswaldo now
claims that we no longer share our by now changed views; and I think that we now do.

On the return trip from Santiago to Montreal in 1967, I finally got my first opportunity to visit Cuba. I went
as Monthly Review correspondent to the first conference of the stillborn OLAS (Organization of Latin
American Solidarity). I met Jose Bell Lara, then the guiding spirit of Pensamiento Critico. He published
many of my articles there, and still comes to vistit us in Holland. We used to agree about most everything,
but now I find his views excessively provincial. In January 1968, I went to Cuba again, this time as invited
delegate to International Congress of Intellectuals in Havana. I would go once again in 1972 as a member
of the jury for the literary prize (in my case in the essay category) awarded annually by the Casa de las
Americas, Cuba's premier cultural organization. We had a falling out, first because they blamed me for the
prize being declared vacant that year and secondly because I criticized them for taking insufficiently
revolutionary positions regarding political literature. Later, my fellow jury member, the Catholic priest and
poet Ernesto Cardinal (who would still later become revolutionary Nicaragua's Minister of Culture)
published part of our private conversation in the memoirs of his Cuba trip. He quoted me as saying that
our host organization, the Casa de las Americas, "was shitty before, and is moreso now." I was never
invited back to Cuba and only went again in 1981 as a member of the Chilean delegation to the Second
Congress of Third World Economists (because I had been the same at the first one in Algiers in 1976,
where I told Celso Furtado to his visible dismay that by then we both had nothing useful left to say).

In 1968 via "May 1968" in Paris, where I first met Samir Amin, I returned to live in Chile. Marta and
the
children went first, and I followed after signing on for an ILO project there. On arrival at the airport, I was
detained and taken into town to see the head of the political police and his almost foot high file about the
supposedly subversive threats I posed. He told me that "sociologia" and "socialismo" were all the
same to
him and sent me back out to the airport to be put on the next plane out. None left, however, before Pedro
Vuscovic from CEPAL/ECLA (and later the controversial Economics Minister of Allende) brought the latter
out to the airport to bring me back in under his authority as president of the Senate and therefore second
in command in the country. The ILO then made a deal with the Minister of the Interior to withdraw me
again. I refused to go; I was fired after a month by the ILO; and I got a job at the University of Chile. After
repeated additional interventions by Allende, I received permission to remain in Chile.

However revolutionary anyone may or may not have been (or thought him/herself to be) then, it is evident
looking back now that no one then, of course, was sufficiently "revolutionary" to incorporate the special
dependence of women into our general dependence theory or to "subvert" the established patriarchal
order of society. I will have to return to this matter below.

From Production of Dependence to its Consumption

(with apologies to my friend Fernando Henrique Cardoso)

So far I have reviewed some of the economic, sociopolitical and personal context of some of the
conflicting, cooperating and compounding production of dependence theory. Cardoso said we should not
use the term "theory" but only "approach." However, Cardoso then also talked and wrote about the
consumption of dependence theory. Dependence "theory" prospered, despite early and
continued
rejection, resistance, and attacks. This "alternative" approach found little favor with the orthodox right,
some of the structuralist reformist left, the Soviet aligned Communists, Trotskyists, and soon also the
Maoists. Nonetheless, dependence was "consumed" in Latin America and elsewhere.

In Latin America, dependence (and I) were enshrined at the Latin American Congress of Sociology in
Mexico in 1969 under the presidency of Pablo Gonzalez Casanova. He was the same person whose book
I had criticized four years earlier in Mexico and who in between had been rector of the National University
there. At the congress of Latin American economists in Maracaibo, Venezuela, resistance was much
fiercer. Indeed, I was run out of town. In 1965 already I had sent the above mentioned letter to about 100
economists about the need for new (read dependence) economics teaching and research in Latin
America. However, students and political groups and parties, and eventually some of the press, all over
the continent took up and fought about the battle cry of dependence. Eduardo Galeano told me that
without my book he could not have written his own best selling Open Veins of Latin America. Of course,
the one word reason for all this consumption of dependence was Cuba and the progress of its
revolution
and attempts to copy it elsewhere.

Dependence theory and writing, including mine, also made a notable impact on and through the "theology
of liberation," which was and still is spread through Catholic Church groups in Latin America. Although we
have never met, the Peruvian "founder" of liberation theology, Gonzalo Gutierrez, acknowledged this
influence in writing. The Chilean Jesuit Gonzalo Arroyo babtized my sister in law's children and took the
occasion to invite me to participate in his seminar at the Catholic University of Chile. We have been
friends ever since. The Canadian theologian Christopher Lind (1983: 158) claims that the Canadian
Confrerence of Catholic Bishops "appropriated the analysis of Andre Gunder Frank on the basis of his
ethics, not his Marxism."

Moreover, dependence "theory" was also consumed elsewhere - in North America, Western Europe, and
by slower and lesser degrees in Africa and Asia, but hardly in the socialist countries. There was also a
one word reason for that consumption: Vietnam. The war and Vietnamese resistance and successes
after the 1968 Tet offensive against the United States and its client government in the South mobilized
people everywhere. The interest was of course especially great among potential draftee students and
other young people in the United States itself. An (perhaps any) alternative to orthodoxy about the Third
World could only be welcome and was soon consumed by social scientists as well.

As thirdworldism prospered in the West and in the South as well, my writings on dependence et al were
published in over twenty languages. These publications now include well over 100 different editions of my
books (the first of which sold some 100,000 copies); chapters in over 100 anthology volumes edited by
others; and over 500 versions of articles in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many were reprinted a
dozen and more times. Of course, I refer to only a small portion of these publications here. There were
also objections to and critiques of my writings. For instance, one writer complained about "Gunder Frank
being exalted to authoritative status in [Bipan Chandra's] Presidential Address...at the Indian History
Congress" and another sought "to fire a red warning flare [against] importing Gunder Frank into Africa."

Nonetheless, the academic and more popular political use of dependency writing, including mine, spread
around the world. The Social Science Citation Index has recorded citations to my writings in about 3,000
journal articles by others. These journals represent two dozen different academic fields and regional
specializations in the social sciences and humanities, and they are published in as many different
countries. 2,000 of these citastions were in the decade 1976-1985. Most of these citations were to my
1960s writings on dependence. Since then, the number of citations has declined to about 100 a year.
Moreover, the references to my writings has gradually been shifting from the earlier ones on dependence
to more recent ones on world system and economic crisis.

From Critiques of Dependence and Gunder Frank...

Academic and policy debates on equity and efficiency in economic development were going on elsewhere
since the mid 1970s. On the left, dependence theory succumbed to the coup in Chile, as we will see
below. Right, center and left (Social democratic, Communist, Maoist, Trotskyist and other) critiques
abounded. In 1972, I reviewed some 100 of them dedicated totally or partially to my own writings. The
critique that would become most celebrated was that of Ernesto Laclau, who charged that I had falsely
confused the capitalist "mode of production" with the capitalist system." (Ironically, two decades later
two
Indian "Marxists" sought sustenance in this Laclau critique for their own critique of my later writings on
social movements, without realizing that Laclau had in the meantime become even more of an enthusiast
of social movements).

The list of critiques of my writings on dependence was updated in 1977, but it has continued growing to
well over 200 critiques since, and the 1972 reply is reprinted as "Answer to Critics" in Frank (1984,
Chapter 24). A sample of some of these "critiques" was that I was a "theorist of an anarchic left,
provocateur, diversionist, confusionist, divisionist ... pseudo-marxist." For one side, I was the principal
"ideologist of terrorism in Latin America" and for the other a "cat's paw of the CIA." One of my
honorable
academic critics went so far as to say in a public lecture in Poland that I had been in charge of
exterminating Jews in a Nazi concentration camp there during World War II. (We may recall that at war's
end, I was 16 and still in high school in the United States). Recurrent more academic critiques were that
my analysis was supposedly "circulationist" (demand side?) instead of "productivist" (supply side?)
and
therefore insufficiently - or altogether un - Marxist. Indeed, a lively but fruitless debate ensued over
whether I am an Orthodox Marxist, a Neo-Marxist, or neither. My answer has always been "none of the
above," for I never laid claim to any of these labels, nor did I wish to assent to or to dissent from any such.
(For my 1972 disclaimer, see Frank 1984:259). More sober and friendlier critiques included "The
Underdevelopment of Gunder Frank" by the Venezuelan Armando Cordova's. We have been friends ever
since.

Very few of the often extremely esoteric academic and/or very interested political critiques hit the nail and
weaknesses of dependence "theory." The latter have, however, become (part of) my own later
auto-critique: 1) real dependence exists, of course, and more than ever despite denials to the contrary.
However, dependence "theory" and policy never answered the question of how to eliminate real
dependence and how to pursue the chimera of non- or in-dependent growth. 2) Dependence heterodoxy
nonetheless maintained the orthodoxy that (under)development must refer to and be organized by and
through (nation state) societies, countries or regions. However, this orthodox tenet turns out to be wrong.
3) I turned orthodoxy on its head, but I maintained the essence of the thesis that
economic-growth-through-capital-accumulation equals development. Thereby, the socialist and
dependence heterodoxies locked themselves into the same traps as the development orthodoxy.
Therefore, I precluded any real alternative definitions, policy and praxis of "development." 4) In
particular,
this orthodoxy incorporated the patriarchal gender structure of society as a matter of course. However
much I may personally have been against male chauvinism, I thereby prevented examination of this
dimension of dependence.

...To Dependency Alternatives from the Left

Supposedly progressive critiques of dependence and more-of-the-same replacements came form the left.
Some came in the form of inward looking involution, which proposed to study all kinds of micro problems
and regions and their "modes of production." The hope was better to analyze the local class structure,
and thereby to learn how to change it. These critiques were largely stillborn as the world economic and
political crisis itself changed the nature and direction of the struggle (of which more below). A more
sophisticated version of these critiques, made for the same purpose as he later told me, was the critique
of the "neo Smithianism" of Sweezy, Frank, and Wallerstein by Bob Brenner (19xx). I went to Los Angeles
to discuss this critique with him. Although we still disagree, we have remained personal friends ever since.
The other main line of critique was an outward looking extension of dependence, which sought to analyze
the whole world system (of which also more below). This line of analysis, in which I particpated myself,
generated little practical policy. Most analysts of the world system hinked behind its rapid crisis generated
transformation, although some also sought to predict its future development (e.g. Amin and Frank 1974,
"Let's not Wait for 1984!" of which also more below). Other alternatives, variants, or combinations, of the
early analyses of dependence were to investigate the "tripple alliance" among foreign and national capital
and the national state (a la Evans 1979) or to make comparative studies of the internal and external
conditions in some European and overseas settler economies. These sought to explain how these
economies avoided dependent peripheralization and underdevelopment (Senghaas 1985).

In the meantime, modernization "theory" was also increasingly self destructing. It did so with a little
help
from us, more from its friends, and most from the supposedly modernizing people themselves, who
responded by revolting against their changing conditions in the course of world accumulation and
development. Even Henry Kissinger pronounced modernization bankrupt after the Ayatollah Khomeini
defeated the super modernizing and super armed Shah of Iran in 1979. Khomeini used nary a bullet and
renounced the goals of Western style modernization and "development."

From Some More Anthropology and Dependence to World System

Still keeping a finger also in the anthropological pie, I wrote to the founder-editor of Current Anthropology,
Sol Tax and other anthropologist friends to initiate the "Responsibility in Anthropology" debate. Its
opening
gun was the abovecited article by Gough (1968). Some of us wanted to use anthropology to support
instead of to combat guerrillas in Indochina and other "developing" regions. I argued against liberal
anthropology and for liberation anthropology (reprinted in Frank 1969). The debate took on some
significance, with Maggie Mead now on the other side. The scope of the debate extended from
anthropologist advisors in Indochina and Thailand to the annual meetings and mushrooming teach-ins in
the United States. They were originally invented for that purpose by the anthropologist Eric Wolf and his
colleagues and students at the University of Michigan.

In another "debate" I put a curse on both the formalist (micro-economic) and substantivist
(institutionalist)
houses in economic anthropology. I argued that neither took proper account of the effects of colonialism
and imperialism on underdevelopment and the peoples they studied. Current Anthropology printed a
"reply" by George Dalton saying that there is no use replying to someone "as full of anger and
ideology."
Later, I returned to the theme of "liberation anthropology" in an article entitled "Anthropology =
Ideology,
Applied Anthropology = Politics" written for the 1973 International Congress of Anthropological and
Ethnological Sciences in Chicago, for which the U.S. government denied me an entry visa. (The last two
are reprinted in Frank 1984).

At the same time, I also participated -- first as a football bounced around by others and then also as an
active contributor--in what came to be known as the "Mode of Production in Indian Agriculture Debate." It
took place mainly in the pages of the Bombay Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) and also turned
around issues of feudalism or capitalism and their respective political implications at the time there were
three different Communist parties in India. One of my "contributions" in EPW in 1973 was entitled "On
'Feudal' Modes, Models and Methods of Escaping Capitalist Reality" (reprinted in Frank 1984). On many
occasion in the 1970s and 1980s, I proposed to published the debate as a book. In the early 1980s, my
then colleague John Harriss and I actually collected it all together, edited it, and he wrote an introduction.
But no publisher would take our book, and one said modes of production were already out of fashion.
Utsa Patnaik, who was the star in the whole debate, finally edited and published it (in part) in 1990.

In the meantime still in Montreal, Said Shah and I put together, like a jigsaw puzzle, an anthology/reader
constructing a dependence theory and analysis for all of the Third World and not just Latin America. The
reader was to have two or three volumes, on the past, present, and future. The first volume was finished.
It began with a critique of received development theory and used selections from Alexander Hamilton and
Friedrich List among others. The next part on theory=history traced the development of a single capitalist
world system. Then came parts which analyzed the development of underdevelopment in that same
system of each of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East-North Africa, and Asia, with separate sections for
India, China, Southeast Asia, and Japan.

The last two of these sections drew heavily on Cliff Geertz's (1966) Agricultural Involution. The Process of
Ecological Change in Indonesia. Geertz countered Boeke's version of dualism and instead demonstrated
how stage by stage Indonesia was underdeveloped by its colonialized participation in the world capitalist
system. I also used Geertz's chapter contrasting Java and Japan. This contrast supported our argument
(also based on Lockwood and Norman) that Japan was never underdeveloped, precisely because it was
never economically or politically colonialized. Higgins had written the foreword to this book, which we both
liked, albeit perhaps for different reasons. However, I failed to be adequately impressed by its reference to
ecological change or anti-development as it would now be called.

In the preface to our reader, we had expressed our hope that our book would soon make itself
unnecessary and out of date. We hoped that its dependence message would soon be accepted and
improved upon by others. I have always regarded this reader as my magnum opus. Alas, our book never
saw the light of day. One publisher after another refused to publish the reader. Through the good offices
of my friend Geoffrey Kay, Cambridge University Press offered to do the first volume on the condition,
among others, that we put "a Marxist view" in the title, which we refused. Other mainstream publishers
refused to publish it because as some admitted it was altogether too radical for them. Smaller progressive
publishers could not publish the book, because it was too expensive for them - and/or because they could
not yet see the coming wave of dependence consumption and new production. Some five years later in
Asia, I noted that this kind of analysis was only just beginning to be made there. Therefore, I again tried to
get at least the section introductions and table of contents published as an article. However, even that
failed. So for the record, I finally placed the latter in an appendix of my essays collected as Critique and
Anti-Critique (Frank 1984).

However, the wave of dependency production and consumption did indeed outdate our book even without
its publication.

Back in Chile in 1968-69, I sat down to write the theoretical introduction to the ill fated "Reader on
Underdevelopment." It addressed various critiques of dependence from the inside and the outside,
friendly and unfriendly. Then I recast the whole question in terms of the historical development of the
world system as a whole. I had already written that underdevelopment through dependence was only a
part of this whole capitalist world economic system in my 1963 manuscript, in my 1964 mimeographed
letter, and in my 1965 preface to my first book. So then in 1969-73, in ever longer draft after draft, this
"introduction" became my history and analysis of this capitalist world system as a whole.

Since the Reader was unpublishable, I decided to convert its theoretical "introduction" into a separate
book. I rewrote it several times (while simultaneously also discussing and writing about current economic
and political policy in Chile) until the military coup there put an end to my endeavors. However until 1978,
no one was willing to publish this world system book manuscript either. Penguin Books had signed and
then renigged on a contract to do so much earlier. The manuscript was finally divided into two parts,
published separately as World Accumulation 1492-1789 and Dependent Accumulation and
Underdevelopment (Frank 1978 a and b). The first title traced the development of the capitalist world
system from the Discovery of America to the French Revolution. In doing so, it laid great stress on the
role of long world economic cycles and crises of capital accumulation in shaping world development and
underdevelopment. The second title concentrated on the role of the dependent Third World in world
system capital accumulation over the past 500 years. I had already written in 1963,1964 and 1965 that
what we need is an analysis of the capitalist world system. These books were my early contribution to this
task. Alas, almost nobody except Eric Wolf (1982) and Albert Bergesen (19xx) took notice.

As I completed my writing in Chile, I received a draft of the first volume of Wallerstein's (1974) Modern
World System. The publisher asked me to write a blurb for its dust jacket. I did and said the book would
become an instant classic. It did. Dos Santos also said that we (in the Third World) have to study the
whole system ourselves and proceeded to write on contemporary American imperialism. Samir Amin
(1974) published his Accumulation on a World Scale, of which he had written a draft for his PhD 15
years before. These studies on accumulation in the world system reflected the ongoing changes in
world development. They were one of the responses by the new development thinking.

From Some Lessons of the Chilean Experiment vs. Dependence ...

In Chile in the meantime, Allende's attempt to introduce socialist reform and reformist socialism came and
went between 1970 and 1973. It had my active but altogether undistinguished small time participation. It
was time to express political sentiments and to put dependence theory to practice. Our house in Chile
became a place of refuge and of discussion for compañeros from near and far. Particularly long live in
friends were Ricardo Letts on the run from the 1968 military coup in Peru and my sociology student at the
University of Chile, Dagoberto Perez, after he emerged from jail for a political crime he did not commit.
After his death in a shoot out with the military regime in 1974, I would dedicate two books to his memory.
Miristas and Socialists, especially Miguel Enriquez, Bautista "El Bauche" van Schowen, Rafael Baraona,
the Editor of Monthly Review in Chile Tito Benado, and the Brazilian Rui Mauro Marini, spent days and
nights at our house and I sometimes in theirs or elsewhere in endless discussions about how to translate
"dependence theory" into political practice in Chile. I also devoted many long sessions at home to Tito
Pizarro and Orlando Caputo's dissertation on how to calculate the financial drain from Chile and Latin
America. I wrote numerous politically inspired or even commissioned articles for the local press on timely
issues of the day. Some, like one on the terms for the nationalization of copper, were written in
collaboration with the journalist Gladys Diaz.

It was an exiting time in which everybody, myself included, debated every kind of economic, social, and
political issue of equity and efficiency in economic development. All of these issues arose daily in the
concrete and took on political form. The Allende government drew substantially on dependence thinking
and tried to introduce anti-dependence measures. Allende also sought, but failed to receive, socialist
support from the Soviet Union for the same.

To achieve equity and efficiency in economic development was more difficult in praxis than in theory. To
begin with as President Allende never tired of pointing out, he was in government but not in power. That is
why I thought the peaceful reformist way would not do. Even to capture and redirect the "potential
surplus" was not so easy. Also, it turned out that improving equity by redistributing income was not so
easy. The resulting change in the structure of consumer demand did not translate into a new structure of
production. Thus, efficiency did not increase, except through lower unemployment. However, equity and
social development took leaps and bounds as the people gained dignity and popular education. Political
participation and democracy mushroomed like never before in Chile and perhaps elsewhere.

However, microeconomic neoclassical "efficiency" considerations did operate to keep the marcoeconomy
going: Sergio Ramos, the Communist Party economist representative on the interministerial economic
committee, and my colleague, friend and neighbor came over to explain why prices had to rise (to get
them right?). He also explained why the now nationalized banks had to continue lending credit to the
self-same enterprises: They had to prevent them from going out of business. If they went busted, they
would create more shortages, renewed unemployment and greater political problems. In 1972-73, I saw
success as increasingly difficult and doubtful. Domestic problems were growing and international ones
were insufficiently appreciated. Kissinger and Nixon had just gone to Bejing and Moscow. They made a
detente pact with Brezhnev, who abandoned Chile as part of the bargain.

At CESO, my institute at the University of Chile (where I was researcher and Marta librarian) Dos Santos,
Marini, Pio Garcia, Marta Harnecker and many others debated the ins and outs of the transition to the
transition to socialism. I made myself unpopular by warning that we should rather worry about the coming
reaction and the possible transition to fascism.

In 1972, at the UNCTAD III meetings in Santiago, I heard "development of underdevelopment" sloganized
by establishment Third World delegates from afar. So I decided it was time to move on. In the same
"UNCTAD" building a few months later, I gave a paper at the Latin American Congress of Sociology. It
was entitled "Dependence is Dead, Long Live Dependence and the Class Struggle." The message was
that dependence itself was alive and kicking, but that the usefulness of dependence theory for political
action had come and gone. That was true at least in Latin America. More and better class struggle was
supposed to be on the agenda. Of course, more class struggle certainly would come. But it hardly
became better, since it came in the form of military coups and repression in Chile and elsewhere. For
instance, a year later Pinochet bombed out the old presidential palace and constitutional president, and
then he moved his new government into the UNCTAD building instead.

A few months later still in 1972, I went to Rome via Dakar. I stopped off in Dakar for a conference at which
Samir Amin, who had also visited me in Santiago, wanted to introduce dependence theory to Africans.
Then in Rome in September 1972, I announced that the world had entered a new Kondratieff B period
of crisis. Giovanni Arrighi had put me on that track. I said that the socialist countries were starting to
reintegrate in the capitalist world economy. I also repeated that not dependence theory but the analysis of
the world crisis of capital accumulation was then on the analytical and theoretical agenda (reprinted in
Frank 1981b). I would spend the next 16 years full time on this agenda, writing several crisis books (Frank
1980, 1981a, 1981b, 1982, 1983/4, 1988a, and countless articles). Alas all that was to no avail.

...To the Reaction and Chicago Boys in Chile

The Chilean experimental laboratory (already in Christian Democratic President Frei's center-right and
Allende's center-left times) has also been exemplary in more recent times. Chile was again important in
development theory, praxis, my own experience and thinking, and the connection among all of these.
Dependence theory and policy was dead indeed. General Pinochet decapitated it with his sword on
September 11, 1973. Then he instituted an ultra-right counter-revolution and counter-reform. Still
confined at home by the 24 hour post coup curfew before we left for Germany, I made several predictions:
a) politically, it would be very bloody - inequitable in the terms of this volume. However, the reality of
30,000 dead, and countless disappeared and tortured to this day exceeded even my worst expectations.
b) economically, Chilean agriculture would become another California - if that is efficiency. Now I have
seen Chilean fruit in supermarkets not only here in Amsterdam, but also in Tokyo, Hawaii, and yes in
California itself. In terms of development theory and praxis, Chile became a major example of export led
growth (albeit not much in manufactures, except for cluster bombs and other arms sold to Iraq and
elsewhere).

The midwife for this transformation was Milton Friedman's monetarism carried to Chile by himself, Arnold
Harberger and the Chicago Boys (This was Chile's version of the earlier Berkeley Mafia in Indonesia). The
new policies were imposed by General Pinochet as equilibrium on the point of a bayonet. That was the
subtitle of my Economic Genocide in Chile. It started as my two open letters to my former professors at
Chicago, Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger (Frank 1976). My open letters also recalled the arrival of
the first Chilean students under Harberger's direction at Chicago while I tried and failed to write a
dissertation under his direction in the mid 1950s. I recalled that the Chicago line already argued in the mid
1950s, in the name of the efficiency of resource allocation, that Chile should abandon its relatively
equitable social welfare system. Meeting Al Harberger again in Chile itself in 1964, I had already argued
against his contention that subsidizing urban bus fares was misallocating resources inefficiently. I claimed
that lower bus fares only helped a bit to redress other inequities and other inefficiencies of resource
allocation. Their marginal cost did not equal marginal revenue or price either. In his militarized Chile,
General Pinochet gave the Chicago Boys free reign over economic policy. Therefore it was only natural
for Friedman and Harberger to come down and to recommend their shock treatment therapy. Free to
Chose Friedman argued that the magic of the market (efficiency?) comes first and freedom (equity?)
later. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics, not for peace, thank God. However, Harvard
refused to accept Harberger for his part in the whole sordid story. Yet, the World Bank still gives Chile the
first pride of place for its model. For us, it has cost the assassination of literally countless personal friends,
some still very recently.

Monetarist and neo-classical supply side reactionary theory and the magic of the market policy swept
around the world. They were enshrined in Reaganomics (which was actually started by Jimmy Carter in
1977) and Thatcherism, which was actually started by James Callaghan in 1976 (see Frank 1980). These
same theories and policies also went on to get pride of place in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Israel, and to
go on into China, the Soviet Union, etc. The 4 Tigers / Dragons in East Asia became the export led growth
model. However, the economic and political importance of the state in South Korea and its political
repression went largely unmentioned until theyt made world headlines because of the 1988 Olympics. If
export led growth has been efficient there and in Taiwan, it is also thanks to the prior increase in the
equity of the distribution of income and the domestic market. These improvements were due to the land
reforms forcibly imposed there and in Japan by the United States after the war. Unlike the World Bank
and others, I took account of these exceptional political and strategic factors. They make these NIC more
of a unique experience than a copyable model. I was also unable to recommend their hardly equitable
political repression as a model. However, I perhaps I underestimated their capacity for technological
upgrading and new participation in the international division of labor (Frank 1981a).

In 1974 already, I said and wrote (reprinted in Frank 1981b) that the Third World response to the new
world economic crisis would be the exports to the world market. I also predicted how and why this
(economically efficient?) model would be ushered in and supported by military coups, martial law,
emergency rule, etc. These are the other (inequitable) political side of the coin of this economic model. It
requires the physical and political repression not only of workers and their unions, but also of industrialists
and others working for the internal market. Alas, events in South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand,
Bangladesh, Pakistan, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and in too many other countries to name proved me
sadly right. For documentation, see my Crisis in the Third World (1981a) chapter 6 on the state and
chapter 7 on political economic repression. In many cases the political repression worked, but the export
led growth led to the to a depression worse than in the 1930s and tothe Third World debt crisis (which
was foretold in chapter 4).

From Basic Needs and NIEO to the Economic and Development Crisis

The ever deepening world economic crisis also undid some new progressive theoretical thinking and
policy by the more-of-the-same establishment. One of these was Growth with Distribution and Basic
Needs (BN). It began at the Institute for Development Studies (IDS) at Sussex, England. then BN was
adopted or adapted by the International Labour Organisation of the United Nations. It was also taken up
by the World Bank under Robert McNamara. After his 1973 speech in Nairobi, the Bank began directing
more funding to agriculture and ostensibly to the poor. In fact, most of its farm support went to middle
peasants, as my fiend Ernest Feder never tired to point out. Both institutions also discovered the
"informal" sector. So now the Establishment started to applaud people who have to fend for themselves
through the informal sector. That was cheaper than reducing their need for doing so by reforming the
formal sector.

The evidence had mounted (and was documented by Adelman and Morris 1973) that even fast growth
had increasingly skewed the domestic distribution of income in one country after another. With this pattern
of growth, the growing masses of very poor and hungry were by passed relatively or even impoverished
absolutely. At the time, the ILO estimated them to number some 600 million in the world. Therefore, the
new Basic Needs Strategy for the Third World was to guarantee everyone a basic minimum livelihood of
food, shelter, clothing, and in some versions also of health and education, etc. In the socialist countries,
this had long since been the policy if not everywhere the practice. The ever deepening world economic
crisis, however, soon left the practice of this BN policy increasingly in the breach in both South and East.
By the early 1980s, the ILO estimate of the very poor had risen to 800 million, and by now it probably is
about 1,000 million.

The other new "development" of the 1970s was the call for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). It
was decided by the Non-Aligned at their meeting in Algiers in 1973. Then the Group of 77 (soon 125)
"developing" countries "resolved" NIEO through United Nations resolutions in 1974. The argument
was
(shades of dependence) that the old international economic order hinders development. So we need a
new one. This NIEO should offer the developing world four things in particulat: 1. better prices for their
commodity exports; 2. greater access to northern markets for their manufacturing exports (which
according to the Lima target should reach 25 per cent of the world total by the year 2000); 3. more
finance, like the link between world creation and distribution to the South of finacial reserve (which was
already demanded and negated at UNCTAD III in 1972); and 4. greater Group of 77 participation in UN
and world decision making.

NIEO was the subject of countless international negotiating conferences. The North only came to them,
as a French minister astutely observed, because OPEC had (temporarily) given the South enough
bargaining power to get the North to sit down at the negotiating table. However, this new Third World
bargaining power was still not enough to make the North say "yes," let alone to give anything away. On
the contrary, the West always, and the East much of the time, voted "no" at all UN and other conferences.
In the real world in the meantime, the growing world economic crisis made the old international economic
order go from bad to worse, instead of better on all four countrs (Frank 1980, Chapter 5).

For a while, there were arguments about whether NIEO demands were a clever diversionary tactic. Were
the rich in the poor countries pointing NIEO finger at international relations to avoid the domestic reforms
necessary to guarantee BN ? Or was it the reverse? Was BN was a clever diversionary tactic by northern
interests like the World Bank to avoid confronting the real need for NIEO? A few people, like Paul
Streeten, pointed out that far from being alternatives, BN and NIEO were really necessary complements. I
argued that they were neither, but only hot air pie in the sky (Frank 1980, chapter 5).

The onset of the Third World debt crisis since 1982, especially in Latin America and Africa but also in
Eastern Europe, resolved the issues in fact. If there was anything new in the economic order, it was that it
became far worse in praxis than the old order of the 1950s-60s. For the South the new order of the 1980s
became worse even than that of the 1970s. As for BN, the relative distribution of income and the number
and depth of absolute poor became far worse than before.

Unlike many of my friends, I had never regarded the multinational corporations and their foreign
investment as the bugaboos. Many had hoped that the replacement of the multinationals' direct
foreign
investment by foreign loans and bank debt would reduce if not eliminate dependence. The new debt
crisis certainly proved them wrong. It vastly increased foreign dependence, even of "sovereign" national
states. Their trade, monetary, fiscal and social or "development" policies are even more constrained now
by foreign debt than they were before by foreign investment before.

The debt is an instrument of neo-colonization and drain of "surplus" from part of the South. By my
calculation, this loss of capital from South to North has been on the order of US $100 billion per year. The
flow was over US $ 500 Billion from 1983 through 1986. $ 200 billion were through debt service, over $
100 billion through capital flight, $ 100 billion through the 40 percent decline in the South's terms of trade,
and $ 100 billion through normal remission of profits and royalty payments. Since then, this South to North
capital flow has been another $400 billion or so. Thus, the Third World countries -- and the East European
"socialist" ones too -- made de facto payments of more than the total of the debt owed. Yet in the
meantime this total nearly doubled once again de jure. Hungary paid the amount of its debt three times
over, and in the meantime the amount still owed doubled! Under "bourgeois" law in any "normal"
capitalist
country, of course, bankruptcy proceedings or "Chapter 11" debt relief would have been instituted long
ago for "the common good." However, this benefit of the "First" world's civilization is not
extended to the
"Second" and "Third World." Perhaps, West Europeans will now extend this proceedure to their
cousins in
the East. The West German government has already quietly absorbed all of the DDR's US$ 21 billions of
foreign debt, the DDR internal government debt, and most enterprise debt to the DDR state bank.

Through much of the 1980s, the annual Third World debt service has been about 6.5 percent of its GNP.
This percentage may be compared to perhaps 1 percent of GNP spent by the US on the Marshall Plan or
by the West on higher oil prices in the 1970s. Even German war reparations in the 1920s only averaged 2
percent and rose to 3.5 percent in 1929-31, before they contributed to the rise of Hitler, who abrogated
them (Frank 1987, 1988a). In my reading of history, this drain is not new, but has always increased
somewhere in the South during each (Kondratieff B phase) economic crisis in the North (for some
evidence see Frank 1978 a and b). As already observed in my opening paragraphs above, this time the
drain has led to an economic depression more severe than that of the 1930s in Latin America and Africa.
Now it is Eastern Europe's turn too. There can be no hope of getting any of Eastern Europe on its
economic feet without remission of the debt. (We should recall that remission of the post World War I debt
was conceeded to West Germany after World War II as the sine qua non of its financial reform).

Failing that in the Third World as well, the result is not development, but the development of
underdevelopment. This time it is with disinvestment in productive infrastructure and human capital
and
with the loss of competitiveness on the world market. As already observed above therefore, another result
is that economic growth = development has practically disappeared from all but the most academic
discussions. Liberal, Keynesian and structural development theories already entered into crisis earlier.
Now neo-liberalism, post-Keynesianism, and neo-structuralism have also become totally irrelevant and
bankrupt for development policy. In the real world, the order of the day has become only economic or
debt crisis management instead.

From the World Economic Crisis, West, East, and South...

The aforementioned book on Crisis: In the Third World (Frank 1981a) is the extension of its companion
volume Crisis:In the World Economy (Frank 1980). Other related occasional articles of mine were
collected together in Reflections on the Economic Crisis (Frank 1981b). A reviewer would comment

Andre Gunder Frank's trilogy does no less than attempt to historically trace and analyze this golbal
crisis in the context of a long-term structural crisis of capital accumulation. Frank was a lone Marxist
voice, anticipating the dangers and potentialities of the deep-rooted crisis which now, 10 years later,
engulfs the capitalist, socialist and Third World regions of the world. In this trilogy, Frank expands his
original insight into a comprehensive, complex, scientific, and passionate treatise (Shank 19xx: )

I wrote these books in Germany. In September 1973, I arrived back in my birth place Berlin as an exile
from Pinochet's Chile exactly 40 years after I had left it as an exile from Hitler's Germany, which burned
my father's books. (He received the highest honors for his humanitarian literature in Imperial, Weimar and
post- World War II Germany, East and West). Urs and Clarita Muller-Plantenberg, whom I met in Chile,
had arranged a visiting professorship for me at the Latin America Institute of the Free University of Berlin.
There, I shared an office with another German exile from Chile, Franz Hinkelhammert. I had said good
bye to him only a couple of weeks before in Santiago after the coup. Then from 1974 to 1978, I worked
elswhere in Germany with the financial support of the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg, the German
Foundation for Peace and Conflict Research, and the Berghof Foundation. All this was only possible
through the personal friendship and political and intellectual support for part of the time from Dieter
Senghaas and for all of the time - and still since then - by Folker Frobel, Jurgen Heinrichs and Otto Kreye.
They were simultaneously writing their related and pathbreaking The New International Division of Labour
(1979). However, we disagreed about the existence or not of a crisis! I spent many years trying to
persude my friends, and finally did --with a little help from the stubborn facts of crisis, which would not go
away!

I was never able to get a professorship in Germany, even though I applied, got on short lists and even
onto first place. Finally, one university president did want to hire me. However, the Minister of Culture, an
ex police chief who now excercised his political judgement as arbitrer of all appointments, told the
president who then informed me "this Frank will never get a professorhip here." So I left Germany in 1978.
By contrast in England, Rhys Jenkins and Chris Edwards published several serious critiques of my
writings on dependence and the world economy. Nonetheless, they urged me to compete for and then
welcomed me as Professor of Social Change in the School of Development Studies at the University of
East Anglia. There I met a professor of German literature. He later sent me photocopies from the German
police files and war archives on my pacifist novelist father for the war years 1916 and 1917, when he was
already in his first exile in Switzerland. Excerpts are: "He suffers from dementia...is supposed to be very
strongly nervous...known as one of the most dangerous Spartacists....very dangerous Anarchist." Plus ca
change...?

My study of the world economy in crisis increasingly included the socialist countries. I had already seen
the beginnings of the reincorporation of the socialist countries in the capitalist world economy in 1972
(reprinted in Frank 1981a). I analyzed the rapid progress of this process in detail in 1976 under the title
"Long Live Transideological Enterprise! The Socialist Economies in the Capitalist International Division of
Labor and West-East-South Political Economic Relations" (Frank 1977 and Frank 1980 chapter 4). I
argued that the "Socialist Second World" occupied an intermediate position in this division of labor
between the industrialized "First World" and the underdeveloped "Third World." However, I still
did not
see clearly enough that the "import led growth" in the East European socialist NICs was essentially the
same as "export led growth" in the capitalist NICs. The former export to import, and the latter import to
export. Almost all amassed foreign and domestic debts. The difference has been that NIC growth in
Eastern Europe has been less successful than in East Asia. The latter now outcompetes the East
Europeans in the world market and wants to invade their own domestic ones too. However, export led
growth has been about equally unsuccessful in the also indebted South America.

Thus, economic crisis, stagnation, recession and even depression also visited some socialist countries of
Eastern Europe. In part, they were home grown problems of transiting from extensive to intensive growth.
In part, they reflected a conjuncture in the built in political investment cycle. In part, they were the result of
the importation of economic crisis, inflation, and debt from the West through the "import led growth" of
the 1970s. All these strands became entangled in the early 1980s. Then, they demonstrated that these
socialist economies were not or no longer immune to the vagaries and costs of economic development in
the world capitalist economy. We now know that the socialist economies also are subject to cycles,
inflation, and soon to unemployment, not to mention inefficiency and inequity. After this was written, the
Revolutions of 1989 were the effect. In the short run however, they can only aggravate these economic
problems.

Yet alongside the much heralded failure of "really existing socialism" in the East, nobody seems to see
the same failure of "really existing capitalism" in the South. (These are compared in Frank 1990c and
1990d). All things considered, the East European model was still politically less repressive and
inequitable (except partially in Rumania) than in the successful EastAsian and the unsuccessful South
American capitalist NIC areas. Moreover, in 1989 Jeanne Kirkpatrick turned out to be wrong: The
"totalitarian" countries in the East changed more than the "authoritarian" ones in the South.
Looking
ahead, proposals to resolve the debt crisis in both abound. However, hardly anyone ever asks how to
make the South American and East European NICs competitive against the East Asian ones and others.
The debt service has made the former lose out in technological and other competition on the world
market. These and other recent reflections on the world economic crisis and its political implications were
collected together in Spanish in Frank (1988a). In English, no one was interested.

I also suggested that, like the last one, this world economic crisis and world wide economic competition
were generating the emergence of economic regionalization and the possible formation of political
economic blocs. My first timid suggestion to this effect was also in 1972 (reprinted in Frank 1981). In the
1980s, I returned to this theme more and more insistently in Frank 1982, 1986, 1988a, 1988c. I also
stressed the increasing conflicts of interest among the NATO allies across the Atlantic and argued for the
political economic realism and desireability of an all European alternative arrangement instead. My title
was The European Challenge: From Atlantic Alliance to Pan-European Entente for Peace and Jobs
(Frank 1983/4). Even though Eastern Europe would be "dependent" on Western Europe, I argued that
their common interests could and should override their supposed capitalist / socialist divisions, which
were becoming increasingly irrelevant anyway. I continued to repeat and extend this argument until mid
1989. Few people regarded my argument and proposal as realistic, but the Revolution of autumn 1989
made them and then some a reality!

... To the Crisis of Socialism and De-linking

In the meantime, these and other momentous events had far-reaching implications and consequences for
development and development thinking. Socialist revolution and development, de-linking and self reliance
were in serous trouble in the Third World. Momentous changes ocurred in the largest country of the Third,
socialist, and entire world, China. The Cultural Revolution proved a failure sometime between 1971 and
1976 (although its human costs did not become clear abroad until later). Mao and Chou En Lai died in
1976. After three years interregnum and the unmasking of the Gang of Four, a new period of anti-Maoist
reforms began in late 1978. Then followed the de-collectivization of agriculture, effective privatization first
of agricultural production and then of some trade and industry. First some special economic zones and
then much of the coastline was opened up to the West. Now it appeared that agricultural incomes had
stagnated and even declined over 20 years since collectivization and the Great Leap Forward. Now the
1980s have witnessed enormous increases in agricultural production and consumption. However, these
changes have also brought on some seemingly typical capitalist inequities: more unemployment, serious
inflation, growing regional and functional inequalities in income distribution, and threatening ecological
degradation. All these benefit some at the expense of others. China came to participate in something of
an economic-political-strategic de facto Beijing-Tokyo-Washington axis. China also went to war with
Vietnam "to teach it a lesson."

All these and other developments obliged all the world, and even development thinkers, to rethink. In
1980, I began an article: "The events of 1979 in and between Kampuchea, Vietnam, and China oblige
socialists to undertake an agonizing reappraisal" (reprinted in Frank 1984, chpt. 20). They certainly
obliged me to revise my own thinking about socialism, development and democracy (of which more
below).

The decade following 1974 witnessed the "liberation" or "enslavement" (depending on point of
view) of 14
countries in Indochina, the Gulf-Horn region of Africa, its ex Portuguese colonies, and in the Central
American-Caribbean region. Gradual de-linking and self-reliance along the "non-capitalist road" of the
1950s and 1960s had previously led Indonesia, Syria, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, ujiama model Tanzania and
so many others to a dead end before or by the 1970s (Algeria and until a few years later Burma were
perhaps partial exceptions) . Now their new "socialism" or "socialist orientation" would lead these
14
countries into another blind alley. Half way down, several have already made a U turn. Mozambique and
others, and even Socialist Vietnam, are attempting to get onto another development track or at least tack.
But with little success so far.

Therefore in 1988, I wrote

A number of conclusions are almost inescapable for Third World countries and liberation
movements today....It is indisputable that both economically and politically the socialist countries are
rapidly reintegrating in the world capitalist international division of labor and promoting peaceful
coexistence between socialist and capitalist states. Moroever, with the particular exceptions (like Cuba
and Vietnam that prove the rule?), the socialist countries have failed tio establish a division of labor and
market as a viable alternative to the world capitalist one, either for themselves and even less for "non
capitalist development" "socialist oriented" progressive Third World countries and liberation
movements....

In short, both objectively and subjectively speaking, really existing socialism offers scant realistic
hopes for any real alternative solution to Third World problems today. The socialist economies offer the
Third World no alternative escape, and their leaders condemn proposals to "stop the world, I want to get
off" and de-link as illusiory and dangerous (Frank 1988b:324,327 and 1989:23,25).

Ironically in Marxist terms, socialism had promoted superstructural political liberation in the Third World
without ever being able to offer any infrastructural economic alternative. All this was the case and written
before the Revolution of 1989 in Eastern Europe, on which I have commented elsewhere (Frank 1990
c,d).

All these backs and forths in economic development theory and praxis make it appear that the real
economic development problem or insufficiency is not human and other capital, social structure, or values
and ideology, but foreign exchange! The master key to the economic development door is the all mighty
dollar. That is what all Third, Second, and not a few First World countries most need and least have to
permit their acquisition of development capital and technology abroad and even at home. The debt ridden
economies of the South and East are all becoming "dollarized." The scarce U.S. dollar increasingly
replaces their excessively plentiful and devalued domestic currency as the medium of exchange, store of
value, and unit of account. Curiously of course, this dollarization spreads around the South and East just
as the dollar and the U.S economy is altering in the West. Ironically, that is when the dollar is being most
revered and enshrined as king in all the "socialist" countries! Every alternative is rejected and no
sacrifice
is too great to worship at the golden dollar altar. (This was written before the events of 1989!).

This lack of real socialist or capitalist development alternatives in the real world calls into question the
realism of the superpowers' ideological battles and military confrontation over their respective models and
clients (as is argued more extensively in Frank 1987). What is all the political fuss about, if these -- and
other -- countries really have no economic alternatives? And are there any other alternatives?

From National or Capitalist/Socialist Development to One World Development...

Before I hazard my own answers if any, perhaps I would do well to return to Higgins' review of his and
others' answers. To begin with, Higgins distinguishes between positivist "is" and normative
"ought"
definitions of development. I now lean to the former. I am prepared to (con)cede to them. Therefore, I will
present my thesis that there is only "world development." It is the
"evolutionary" (to use Higgins
terminology) positivist (that is negative) constraint on the normative development there "ought" to be.
Thus, my one world development conception can perhaps be subsumed under two of Higgins'
classifications of development views: No goals of society but only of particular groups or classes, and
especially the long process of development with periods of stagnation interrupted by rapid change
(Higgins 1990:3-4).

In that case, I can heartily agree to Higgins' definition of development in "simplest terms as a process of
economic, social, and technological change by which human welfare is improved. Thus development is
'good' by definition."

Anything that raises the level of human welfare contributes to development; anything that reduces
welfare is anti-development, a subtraction from development. Thus, damage to the environment,
exhaustion of non-renewable resources, deterioration of the quality of life, destructions of traditional
cultural values, increasing inequalities, or loss of freedom which may appear as side effects of certain
strategies to promote development reduce the amount of development that is actually achieved. By
definition -- my definition -- there can be no conflict between efficiency

and development. They are one and the same thing, and so are improvements in the level of
welfare [and social justice, which Higgins adds below] (Higgins 1991).

By this definition, development is a process, and not a state or stage. By analogy, socialism
would at
best also still be a process. So it was for Marx and Lenin. For them socialism was not an already existing
happy state, as Stalin re-defined it. Has someone also re-defined development as a process in the same
way? Moreover, to Higgins' economic, social and technological development; we should then add
political, cultural, and perhaps spiritual and other dimensions of development. Presumably this would
have his agreement, since he suggests about the same in his own discussion of anti-development. As
Higgins argues therefore, the increase in some of these dimensions at the expense of others does not
necessarily spell a process of development. Furthermore by this definition, no country, nation state,
economy, or people would be developed. The industrial(ly) "developed" countries of the West would at
best be developing, if they are not underdeveloping. The same would then be true for
the countries,
regions or peoples in the Socialist East and the Third World South. In many of the latter, however, the
process (to coin a phrase) of development of underdevelopment is proceeding apace and even
accelerating. Of course, this is also a process, as I always insisted.

The idea of one world development (as is) received an unexpected helping hand from the Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev at the United Nations on December 7, 1988:

The existence of any "closed" societies is hardly possible today. That is why we need a radical
revision of views on the sum total of the problems of international cooperation as the most essential
component of universal security. The world economy is becoming a single organism, outside which no
state can develop normally, regardless of the social system it might belong to or the economic level it has
reached....

Further global progress is now possible only through quest for universal consensus in the
movement toward a new world order....

Freedom of choice is a universal principle. It knows no exceptions....So what we need is unity
through variety....This new stage demand[s] that international relations be freed from ideology (Gorbachev
1988).

Though we may wish to regard some of these as high sounding words, we cannot deny or evade the
verity and importance of the central thrust of what Gorbachev says. Moreover, it has direct relevance to
our present concern with development, if we use this word where he speaks of "progress" and
"security."

However, I would argue that this verity is nothing new. World development, sorry - evolution, has been a
fact of life for a long time. For a while, I thought that it started with the birth of the world capitalist system
five centuries ago. However, I now believe in applying the rule of the American historian of China John
King Fairbank (1969) to study historical problems by pursuing them backwards. Therefore, I now find
the
same continuing world system, including its center-periphery structure, hegemony-rivalry competiton,
and cyclical ups and downs has been evolving (developing?) for five thousand years at least (Frank
1990a, 1991, Gills and Frank 1990). In this context, the mixtures and variations of different "modes" of
production or of social systems are much less important than the constancy and continutiy of the world
system and its essential structure (Frank 1990b). Even Gorbachev dismisses the relevance of these
variations among suposedly different "systems" to this real world system development.

In this world system, sectors, regions and peoples temporarily and cyclically assume leading and
hegemonic central (core) positions of social and technological "development." They then have to cede
their pride of place to new ones who replace them. Usually this happens after a long interregnum of crisis
in the system. During this time of crisis, there is intense competition for leadership and hegemony. The
central core has moved around the globe in a predominantly westerly direction. With some zig zags, the
central core has passed through Asia, East (China), Central (Mongolia), South (India) and West (Iran,
Mesopotamia, Egypt, Turkey). (The latter is now called the "Middle East" in eurocentric terminology).
Then, the core passed on to Southern and Western Europe and Britain, via the Atlantic to North America,
and now across it and the Pacific towards Japan. Who knows, perhaps one day it will pass back all the
way around the world to China.

In the social evolution (to use Higgins terminology) of this world system in recent centuries, of course
there has also been a positivist "as is" development of the capitalist and patriarchic
system in the world.
At the sub-system levels of countries, regions or sectors, all "as is" or even the "ought be"
"development"
has ocurred through and thanks to their (temporarily) more privileged position in the inter"national"
division of labor and power. The recently prevalent positivist "as is" and normative "ought be"
notions of
"national development" are the result of a myopic optical illusion. These notions and the illusion are
derived from a self-interested selective tunnel vision perception. It lacks an objective global assessment of
real world development, either as is or as ought be. The development ideology reviewed here was based
on and is now doomed by this self-illusory perception. It is less and less sustainable in the face of hard
reality. Instead as suggested above, we now need to replace this development theory, as well as
micro-supply and macro-demand side economic theories, by another one. We need a more rounded,
dynamic and all-encompassing supply and demand side economics to analyze, if not to guide, world
economic and technological development.

Real world system evolution has never been guided by or responsive to any global and also not to much
local "development" thinking or policy. However, each temporarily leading people probably considered
itself as the "developed" civilization and regarded others as "barbarians." Global evolution (or
"as is"
development) has taken place for a long time. However, it has never been uniform and has always
centered in one or a few places. These places and peoples temporarily enjoyed privileged cultural, social,
economic, technological, military, and political positions relative to other "dependent" ones. That is,
general and especially uniform global development was and remains impossible. The reason is that
Gorbachev's (and Higgins') conditions were and remain unfulfilled and unfulfillable. Lower order national /
regional / sectoral / group / individual development policy can only marginally affect but not transform the
stage of global evolution. Moreover, it can only take place within the possibilities and constraints of that
global evolutionary process, which it only helps to shape.

Therefore, any development "policy" for a particular country, region, sector, group or individual must
identify and promote some selected "comparative" advantage within the world economy.

The "policy" is to find one or more niches in which to carve out a temporary position of
"comparative"
monopoly advantage in the international division of labor. Then, it may be possible to derive some
temporary monopoly rent from the same. Some specialization is necessary, because advantageous and
even loss avoiding presence on all industrial and technological fronts is impossible today. Of course, it is
advantageous to do so in a newly leading industry or sector, which is itself able to command temporary
monopoly rents. However, each such sector, and even more so each such region or group operating
within it, must count on soon losing this advantage again. For soon they will be displaced by competition
from others on the world market. The element of classical "comparative advantage" in this strategy might
be named after the snowmobile. Some Canadians developed the technologically new snowmobile in
response to regional snowy conditions, resources and market possibilities. However, then they used the
same locally developed snowmobile to carve out a temporary niche on the world market for themselves.

On the other hand, what Gorbachev observes correctly is that any discreet national or other sub-global
development is now even more impossible than before. No independent national state development is
possible at all. This fact of life contradicts all postwar development thinking and policy. Moreover,
Gorbachev also points out that a "development" policy of de-linking is now unrealistic. I now also believe
that such de-linking is impossible. That is contrary to my own previous view and to one still held by Samir
Amin (1986).

...And Toward Marginalizing Dualism ?

What is a realistic prospect, however, is the growing threat to countries, regions and peoples to
be
marginalized. That is, they may be involuntarily de-linked from the world process of evolution or
development. However, they are then de-linked on terms, which are not of their own choosing. The most
obvious case in point is much of sub-Saharan Africa. There is a decreasing world market in the
international division of labor for Africa's natural and human resources. Having been squeezed dry like a
lemon in the course of world capitalist "development," much of Africa may now be abandoned to its fate.
However, the same fate increasingly also threatens other regions and peoples elsewhere. Moreover, they
may be found everywhere: In the South (eg. Bangladesh, the Brazilian Northeast, Central America, etc.);
in the ex-industrial rustbelt, the South Bronx, and other regions and peoples in the West; and in whole
interior regions and peoples in the "socialist" East, eg. on both sides of the Sino-Soviet border. Events in
1989-90 after these lines were written must accelarate and aggravate the marginalization of millions of
people in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Many regions there are more likely to be
Latinamericanized, and some even Africanized and Lebanonized, instead of achieving the West
Europanization to which they aspire (Frank 1990 c,d).

People in all these and other places may now be sacrificed on the altar of growth pole "development"
policy. They fall victim to efficient competitive participation in the international division of labor in the world
capitalist market and to contemporary social evolution. However, the West may well receive much more
migration by the few who can, among the many who wish, to escape this marginal existence in Central
America and Africa. North America and Western but soon maybe also Eastern Europe and Japan will be
the magnets. Many people prefer to survive exploited by the division of labor in the North than to suffer
death by war and starvation or marginalized life without hope in the South.

In other words, a dual economy and society may now indeed be in the process of formation at this
stage of social evolution in the world system. However, this new dualism is different from the old
dualism I rejected. The similarity between the two "dualisms" is only apparent. According to the old
dualism, sectors or regions were supposedly separate. That is, they supposedly existed without past or
present exploitation between them before "modernization" would join them happily ever after.
Moreover,
this separate dual existence was seen within countries. I correctly denied all these propositions. In the
new dualism, the separation comes afterthe contact and often after exploitation. The lemon is
discarded
after squeezing it dry. Thus, this new dualism is theresult of the process of social and
technological
evolution, which others call "development." Moreover, this new dualism is between those who do and
those who cannot participate in a world wide division of labor. To some extent, the ins and outs of this
world division of labor are in part technologically determined. Thus, this new dualism may partake of
Higgins' old technological dualism. Perhaps, I should never have lumped his technological dualism in with
the old socio-economic kind.

To summarize crudely, lower order (country and regional) development can only carve out a privileged
niche at the expense of others within the process of social (including technological) evolution. This niche
is usually based on temporary monopoly power. The whole process may be a positive sum game.
However, the threats of nuclear war and environmental degradation render this possibility increasingly
doubtful. Yet even in a positive sum game, most development for one group still comes at the expense of
anti-development for others. They are condemned to dualistic marginalization and/or to
underdevelopment of development. That is what real world development really means. Therefore,
Higgins' normative definition of development as it ought to be by raising all human welfare turns out
to be
hardly operational. I myself seem to have come full circle from prioritizing determinant economic, to social,
to political back to the determinant economic factors in development. However, now I see them in world
economic development. Marta finds that economic problems cannot be solved by economic means. She
thinks that the mistake has been to try that route. Solutions to economic problems must be sought in
other ways.

Toward Democracy

All these developments have also elevated another consideration to the top of the agenda: democracy
and especially participatory democracy. Of course, the word "democracy" had been a fellow traveler along
these roads all along. But the likes of Rostow Pye, Pool, and Huntington wrote and acted to impose
"democracy" under the military boot. Even the Quaker Benoit claimed to have statistically demonstrated
that more military = more development. Political modernizers like Apter, Almond and Coleman condoned
Third World right wing authoritarian regimes in the name of political "democracy" and economic
"development." The longstanding practice was to defend right wing authoritarianism as a necessary
instrumental defense against left wing totalitarianism in the name of "democratic freedom." This was so
long before the US Ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne Kirkpatrick popularized this subtle
distinction on the right. On the left, the political line was "economic democracy" in the country and
"democratic centralism" in the party. The total lack of democracy today (and for all too many yesteryears
before) was defended as instrumentally necessary to assure more democracy and development
tomorrow. In the name of a top down "mass line," mea culpa, mea maxima culpa I sometimes
also fell
victim to this short shrift for democracy on the left. At least, I closed a blind eye to it. Today, development
must include more democracy. (More) democracy must include (more) respect for human rights. These
rights must include (more) political freedom of speech, organization and choice. However, these human
rights must also include access to the economic and social basic human needs necessary to exercise
such political choice.

The political crisis of military and authoritarian rule in the Third World and the crisis of socialism (and
Marxism) in the East increasingly opened peoples eyes. Even social "scientific" development thinkers
followed. Military rule in Latin America and incessant coups d'etat in Africa popularized the study of the
state. People sought some other way to run it. The conversion of some socialist dreams into nightmares
gave interest in democracy a new lease on life to people in the socialist countries themselves and to
those outside who were sympathetic to them. Among socialists in the West, it became obvious (why so
late?) that any socialist progress and any progress of socialism would have to safeguard and improve
upon the advances and benefits of "bourgeois" democracy. That would be an absolute minimum socialist
demand, and "socialism" could not negate these rights as heretofore. So we can sum up the matter from
a worm's eye view. If the economic crisis precludes present and foreseeable progress in economic
development or welfare, we the people at least demand the political possibility democratically to express
our gripes about it. We the people demand at least the possibility to pursue any alternatives we can find
or forge ourselves -- in participatory democracy through our own popular social movements and with a
minimum respect for everybody's human rights.

For by now it is sadly clear that none of the now available "models" of development are adequate for the
present, let alone for the future. This inadequacy is true of all these models, however they may (seem to)
differ among each other. This inadequacy characterizes the magic of the world and domestic market,
Western top down political democracy, Eastern top down economic democracy, and recent attempts at
self-reliant national state de-linking. However hopes are illusiory for a capitalist new international
economic order, or for the non-existent and ever less available alternative socialist division of labor /
international economic order. Nor does any thing else on the horizon offer most of the population in much
of this Third World any chance or hope for equity or efficiency in economic development. This is true at
least as long as we, and especially they, define development in any of the orthodox more-of-the-same
ways. However it is unfortunately equally true also of the heterodox more-or-less-the-same ways so far
reviewed above. As a result by the 1980s for instance, the grand old men Gunnar Myrdal and Raul
Prebisch significantly radicalized their views and public statements shortly before they died. (I had
criticized them both as excessively conservative reformists in the 1960s). So what and where are the real
alternatives and the more participatory democratic ways to forge and pursue them?

...and Alternative Self-Development

Armed with these alternative as is and as ought definitions and goals of development, we can now
pursue some other development alternatives -- or Another Development, as the Dag Hammarskjold
Foundation called it. First, like these disadvantaged peoples themselves, we can do battle with
anti-development or underdevelopment of development as it affects all sorts of "minority" peoples.
However, on further inspection these disadvantaged minorities turn out to be in the majority. Minorities
would not demand and merit their own and others' special attention qua minorities, if they did not suffer
from discrimination and worse at the hands of "the majority." Ethnic, national, linguistic, racial, social,
sectoral, age, vocational and other minorities are all subject to the inequity and inefficiency of economic
development. Adding them all up, they surely constitute a numerical majority both globally and nationally.

The biggest "minority," (which admittedly overlaps with these others) is women. They assuredly
constitute
a statistical majority of the world's and probably all countries' population. Moreover, it has belatedly been
statistically confirmed (as women knew all along in their bones if not in their minds) that women do most
of the work in the world. They do all the unpaid and much of the low paid reproductive work. They also do
much of the productive work: Women do most of the agricultural work in Africa and in many other parts of
the world, including the socialist countries. Women also do much low paid industrial and service work
everywhere. Adding in the other minorities, probably almost all of the work, and especially the hard part of
it, is done by "minorities."

Then, what is the "majority," and what does it do? It is the elite that has and uses power -- also to
define
and promote (its own) "development." For, the majority of these "minority" people
do not benefit from
(equity and efficiency in) economic development. Since "development" is largely the result of work by and
for (the welfare of) the majority, it should see this benefit. Since they do not, there must be something
wrong , both in the real world and in our "majority" thinking about it!

Some thinking and praxis has changed, but not much. Marx (!) wanted greater incorporation of women in
the labor force as a vehicle of their liberation, but he also expressed fears about the resultant damage to
the family. Stalin (!) was perhaps the greatest proponent of womens lib and did the most to incorporate
women in the labor force. However, he may have wanted to further Soviet economic "development" more
than to liberate women. Their work in the Soviet Union is still unquestioned, but their liberation less so.
Their welfare benefit from "development" is certainly questionable. Women also entered the productive
labor force elsewhere to replace men. For many went to war or migrated to spur production in other
regions or countries. Or women simply entered for other practical reasons. Even so, much female work
has failed to register in social norms or cultural thinking. Despite the above noted work of women in
agriculture, land "to those who work it" reforms or technical extension and credit to "agricultural
producers" have nowhere been directed at women instead of men! (Why did neither I nor the land
reformers "see" this in Chile, when the ownership in land was distributed to men even where and when it
was worked by women in female headed households?) Nor have women in the informal sector in Africa,
Asia, and Latin America fared much better when it comes to credit or institutional support. The (still small)
recent redirection of development policy and extension work towards women in the Third World must be
ascribed to the force of the (re)new(ed) world wide womens (lib?) movement and to its influence on
perceptions and equity.

Academia in the West also discovered women and affirmative action towards them. "Home economics"
was transformed and vastly expanded into "womens studies." Courses or even entire programs taught by
women mushroomed on "womens history," "women in society," "women and politics," etc. So
"women
and development" also had to follow. Of course, nobody ever said "men's history and development," etc.
even if, like Moliere's famous character, they were speaking male prose about men's history and male
society and development. Nor does women's lib in the North automatically change womens views of their
sisters in the South. At a womens history conference in Amsterdam, Third World women were excluded
and told they had no history. So they protested with signs reading "history, her
story, and the real story."
However, just putting some (mostly upper/middle class white) women back into the picture, as in a slide
show I saw about womens history in Peru, only inverts the matter. It only studies the history (or
development) of women instead of or in addition to that of men.

Nor does looking at women and development necessarily tell the real development story. Marta got
an
MA in "Women and Development" and learned nothing new about development but much about women
and anti-development. The place of women and men in the patriarchal gender structure of society has
not penetrated "development theory" and cannot be told simply by relating the story of one
or/and the
other. The real story to be (re)told is of the structure and development of society itself.

The personal is (also) political, as the feminist refrain has it. That is, the meaning of relational terms are
transformed. Therefore also, women and development cannot be only more-of-the-same-old women's
development of women instead of or in addition to men. Man made development must be transformed to
encompass progressive change in the whole gender structure of society itself. In a word, we must
re-conceptualize and re-define development itself to refer to such social transformation of societal
relations (and perceptions). Therefore it is only a small step in the right direction to change the emphasis
from social factors in or for economic development to social and economic
development, especially for
women and their children.

Some additional feeble steps were taken, or perhaps more accurately recorded, at the UN sponsored
world womens congresses in Mexico in 1975, Copenhagen in 1980 and Nairobi in 1985. They sought to
advance women by their own efforts from their back stage work to at least visible stage performance, if
not yet to center stage. However, the present stage or moment of social evolution (if we may not say of
world development) generates the feminization of poverty. Therefore, in our topsy turvy real world
wonderland, these women are only taking modest steps on a gigantic treadmill. But it is moving in the
opposite direction under their very feet. Like the Red Queen in Alice's wonderland, they would have to run
a lot faster just to stay in the same place.

Therefore, the issue in this development is not only for women but for everybody to stop or reverse the
treadmill. We would have to rewrite the whole gender play and reconstruct the social stage altogether.
That would be development! It would be at once more equitable and more efficient, if we still wished
to
use these terms. Then we could not call Switzerland and Japan developed societies ,
no matter how
financially or technologically "developed" their economies are. For until recently women could not even
vote in Switzerland; and in Japan, women are still treated like geishas not only in mens clubs but also in
many of their homes, offices, factories, and fields.

Many other "minorities" also suffer from anti-development. For instance, many racial, ethnic, national,
religious and other minorities are also on real world wonderland treadmills. The real economic losses they
suffer often more than counteract the sometime legal and other steps taken by themselves or on their
behalf. Pro forma or even de jure recognition of discrimination against these "minorities" hardly
counteracts, much less undoes, the de facto plights they suffer. As a result people resort to many
self-empowering slogans and movements to at least enhance their own culture and dignity:
small-is-beautiful, black-is-beautiful, (this) indigenous-is-noble, (our) nation-is-glorious, (true)
religion-is-blessed, (our) community-is-ours, and other defensive (and sometimes, in more senses than
one, offensive) slogans and movements. They may be an important element of and contribution to cultural
reassertion and self-development, or of ethno-development as Rodolfo Stavenhagen (of earlier Seven
Theses fame) now calls it. They maybe even increase the number and velocity of steps on the treadmill.
However, they do not necessarily stop or reverse the treadmill or significantly affect the evolutionary
process itself.

Other costs of anti-development and underdevelopment of development even subtract from the welfare
of the vast majority. Hoverer, they may be combatted only by real numerical minority social movements.
Ever developing threats to peace and the environment are cases in point. The Scandinavian headed
Palme Commission and Brundtland Report and the United Nations special session on Development and
Disarmament have drawn world wide attention to and sought to mobilize action on these problems and
their connections. Although strong peace movements are more visible in the North, the problem of hot war
is, of course, particularly important in and for the South. During the past four decades of accelerated
Third World "development," every war in the World has taken place in the South, and
every year there
have been several wars going on there simultaneously. Any break out of peace in the South, such as in
1988, is therefore a real (contribution to) development. Growing peace and human rights movements in
the South itself, with notable womens leadership and participation, are now making increasing
contributions to this development.

Similarly, although environmental degradation may be more (locally) visible in the North (including the
East), the globally most serious environmental anti-development is now probably taking place in the
South. Important instances are the deforestation of Amazonia, Indonesia, the Himalayan slopes, etc. and
the desertification in Africa and Asia. Therefore all around the globe, regional, local, peasant, native, tribal
and other environmental movements are mobilizing to protect their own sources of livelihood. However,
thereby they are also protecting ecological survival for all of us through another and a sustainable
eco-development (Redclift 1987).

To end on a positive upbeat note, I applaud and participate in these social movements of participatory
civil democracy. They do all they can to mobilize their participants for real - that is self - development for
themselves and often also for others in their respective spheres of influence (Rahman 1989). Indeed, they
express and exercise their participants freedom of choice for their own variety within the unity of our one
world. I have also written about these movements and their development of civil democracy in the West,
East, and South. This time I wrote with Marta in Fuentes and Frank (1989) and Frank and Fuentes (1990).

Our "Ten Theses on Social Movements" are:

1. The "new" social movements are not new, even if they have some new features; and the
"classical" ones are relatively new and perhaps temporary.

2. Social movements display much variety and changeability, but have in common individual
mobilization through a sense of morality and (in)justice and social power through social mobilization
against deprivation and for survival and identity.

3. The strength and importance of social movements is cyclical and related to long political
economic and (perhaps associated) ideological cycles. When the conditions that give rise to the
movements change (through the action of the movements themselves and/or more usually due to
changing circumstances), the movements tend to disappear.

4. It is important to distinguish the class composition of social movements, which are mostly
middle class in the West, popular/working class in the South, and some of each in the East.

5. There are many different kinds of social movements. The majority seek more autonomy rather
than state power; and the latter tend to negate themselves as social movements.

6. Although most social movements are more defensive than offensive and tend to be temporary,
they are important (today and tomorrow perhaps the most important) agents of social transformation.

7. In particular, social movements appear as the agents and reinterpreters of "delinking" from
contemporary capitalism and "transition to socialism".

8. Some social movements are likely to overlap in membership or be more compatible and permit
coalition with others; and some are likely to conflict and compete with others. It may be useful to inquire
into these relations.

9. However, since social movements, like street theater, write their own scripts - if any - as they go
along, any prescription of agendas or strategies, let alone tactics, by outsiders - not to mention
intellectuals - is likely to be irrelevant at best and counterproductive at worst.

10. In conclusion, social movements now serve to extend, deepen and even redefine democracy
from traditional state political and economic democracy to civil democracy in civil society (Fuentes and
Frank: 1989:179).

Therefore, popular social movements, especially with the more active participation and leadership of
women, can also be the initiators, instruments, and beneficiaries of another more democratic
development.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In the preparation of this autobiographical survey, I am indebted to each of the friends I name therein.
However, my greatest debt is to the members of my family, who have shared and suffered - often more
than I - these experiences with me. Moreover, each of them, Miguel, Paulo and Marta has also done
some work on this essay itself. Especially Marta's input has been much greater than either of us
acknowledge. She chose to witdraw her name from the joint authorship of the early drafts. So I had to
eliminate several references to her, and I changed most everything from "we" to "I."

FRANK, A. G. REFERENCES CITED

1955a. "The Economic Development of Nicaragua"

Inter American Economic Affairs VIII, 4, Spring

1955b. "Policy Decisions and the Economic Development of Ceylon" Economia Internazionale VIII, 4,
November

1958. "General Productivity in Soviet Agriculture and Industry: The Ukraine 1928-53" Journal of
Political
Economy 66 December

1990d. "East European Revolution of 1989. Lessons for Democratic Social Movements (and Socialists?).

in The Future of Socialism: Perspectives from the Left. William K. Tabb, Ed. New York: Monthly
Review Press 1990, pp. 87-105. Also in Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay) XXV, 4, February 3,
1990, pp. 251-258, and Third World Quarterly (London) XII, 2, April, 1990, pp. 36-52.